City of Sparkles: Embodying Cityscape of Human Memories

How might an artificial life form perceive our city? "City of Sparkles" is an interactive VR data visualization experience where participants embody an AI-based artificial life exploring a cityscape of vast human memory fragments. Participants fly over an artistic digital twin of New York City using bare-handed gestures. Each "sparkle" represents a geo-tagged tweet collected from X (Twitter) spanning years. Colors, motion, and visual effects reflect the emotional tone of these tweets as they float above the photogrammetry-based city model. The experience serves as experiential storytelling of the speculative fiction "Composable Life," where participants are situated in the perspective of Zoe—a protagonist artificial life inhabiting the "Mnemosyne Sea," a vast ocean of human memory fragments scattered across social media. This project invites reflection on how an immortal artificial life might perceive our cities and memories. It explores using non-fictional, real-world data to tell a fictional story from a non-human perspective, stimulating dialogue about future human-AI relationships.