Hasta La Ideas

Bartlett School of Architecture graduate Richard Hardy has shared with us his short film imagining an autonomous, artificially intelligent, sustainable city 

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The city would adapt to its natural environment and derive energy from available renewable resources.

In The Transcendent City, Hardy envisions a machine developed in response to society’s inability to tackle environmental dangers.

The film’s aim was to explore the idea that artificial intelligence is a necessity for the future of human evolution and supports his 10,000 word Masters thesis.

The animation was hand-drawn then digitally rendered, before being animated using techniques often found in Japanese anime.

Hardy is one-third of the We Are Om film collective.

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Here are more details from Hardy:

The concept of a future sustainable city is developed for a society that is currently not responding effectively to environmental dangers. “Transcendence” in this case referring to a point when artificial intelligence has reached or surpassed that of the human.

The Transcendent City is an autonomous artificial machine that extends across the earth adapting to the natural eco-systems it encounters while deriving its energy from the renewable resources available at each particular site. The systems desire is to maintain homeostasis within itself whilst maintaining homeostasis within the greater system, Gaia. Its processes are engineered on the molecular scale by nano technologies controlled by molecular computers that monitor and analyse the environment.

The film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture questions whether the conception of artificial intelligence has been a necessity in human evolution and if we therefore should embrace emergent technologies to engage with problems of sustainability and the city.

Music by Sonically Yours

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