This work is part of the Urban Walks project, supported by Goethe Institut Hong Kong, in association with Studio for Narrative Spaces and Goethe Institut Korea. Information on the exhibition, generative AI workshop, and urban walks opening tour.
The tangible Cultural Heritage of Hong Kong continues to be eroded, changed by the environment that becomes unpredictable by the day, from conflicts to climate change, from people who care to people who don’t. The tramway we took in our childhood journeying next to the shoreline no longer serves a nostalgic purpose, but rather becomes a party line for the next generation. Our beloved community markets of the past are now malls serving packaged food. To capture Hong Kong’s Cultural Heritage of the present requires more than preservation of the physical entity; it requires preservation of our interpretation of the present, our stories of the moment, our connections to the places that we remember now.
“the present in the future is the past” exhibits Hong Kongers’ and foreign visitors’ expression of their connections and narratives concerning eight Cultural Heritage locations, as well as their imagination of how these sites will be transformed and adapted in the future. This multimedia sculptural, AR, robotic, and AI-generated vision of our current connection to Cultural Heritage will be remembered in the future as a document of the past through our present tense.
To see how people imagine the past and envision of future of Cultural Heritage of Hong Kong, we created a workshop that invites non-expert participants to use generative AI tools to make images based on what they wanted to express, and what they imagined. They often used realistic-looking images to empower their expression regarding sites that are familiar to them, while employing surreal and futuristic pictures to show their imagination regarding distant locations that are unfamiliar to them. Participants interacted with generative AI using either a narrative and a descriptive workflow, while utilizing either realistic or creative image styles. A 3D model is joined to the images they produced for an AR app that creates urban walks around the city for the visitor, allow her to see the city from the expressive and imaginative perspectives of others.
the present in the future is the past 