Confidential Records: Dual Metropolitans
2016-2018

Throughout the past hundred years, Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong mostly worked as a community that with military and political function,it maximized the ability of improvisation and compatibility, and finally developed into a huge and comprehensive urban system. The issue of governance of the site which had permitted the unfettered development of these few hectares was finally resolved and the decades of growth ended in the 1990s. Scientist Ray Kurzweil defined the acceleration of development of technology as the Law of Accelerating Returns. He reckons that technology is growing exponentially, that humans could make the progress of the entire 20th century with only 20 years in 21 century, and we are here right before the “explosion”, what will happen decades later might threaten all human beings.Having conducted extensive research and interviews on the history of the Kowloon Walled City, the artist utilises these old memories and scientific prediction, and reimagines a fantastical Underground Walled City that evolves into the last defence of human beings against artificial intelligence. Through the daring escape of a VOKKALO series artificial intelligence, the conflict was revealed. Huge data flows between these two gigantic memory systems, how the future world would become? What functions will the Underground Kowloon Walled City have, what progress will it have made? What kind of role will it play between artificial intelligence and human beings?