“Reservoirs of Venice” is our contribution to the 19th Venice Architettura Biennial: Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. The project explores the potential of using the urban environment as a computational medium to reflect its own conditions and predict its future.

Dietmar Offenhuber and I collaborated on building a “water computer” that learns from human activity, gleaned from the spatiotemporal patterns of Venice’s water surfaces. During the exhibition, the installation will learn to interpret its activity resulting from human movement and environmental conditions, and to predict the time of day. Unlike energy-intensive digital AI systems, this computer is composed of the very elements it computes with, and requires only a fraction of the energy to operate.

The work critically engages with urban computing by moving beyond traditional data-centric paradigms. Historically, urban computing has focused either on digital systems – relying on sensors and control networks – or on models that use physical analogies to understand urban dynamics. Reservoirs of Venice proposes a third paradigm in which physical processes are used to transform information, rather than serve as analogies.

For more information, please see:
res-venice.github.io

Photography: Sebastian Gonzalez Quintero