Cao Zhen

caozhen0806@126.com

As part of the fourth Go! Design Community Festival in Shenzhen, two interactive art installations are on display at the Sea World Culture and Arts Center until February 20, 2021.

The two works were created by architecture students from Shenzhen University and Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen at the AI Design Workshop co-organized by Huawei Cloud and Design Society.

To make the “Shekou Tells You Everything” installation, the students recorded sounds in Shekou fishing villages, stored the audio materials in the Huawei Cloud OBS (Object Storage Service) and then trained an AI model through ModelArts to identify unique sounds in Shekou. Visitors can not only listen to fishermen’s voices, ship whistles and children’s laughter in Shekou, but also upload their own sounds through this installation, thus forming an open “sound theater” in the cloud.

The installation “2020.11.27” focuses on community markets to illustrate how a city changes over decades. The students used the Huawei HiLens Kit for filming in a Shekou market and obtained data about human traffic flow by utilizing the human recognition model. “Humans’ memories will fade but machines will keep them forever. This art installation with AI displays a day’s scene in the Shekou market, which is a combination of data and humanity,” said Qu Fei, an assistant professor from the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Shenzhen University.

“AI is a tool for connecting people, communities and architecture. It’s interesting to consider how AI inspires the old concepts of community architecture design,” said Ole Bouman, founding director of Design Society.

At the three-week workshop, the students visited four communities in Shekou, studied cloud and AI technology and designed art installations. “These art installations combined with AI are amazing and we hope ModelArts, a one-stop development platform for AI developers, could be a useful partner for artists,” said Yuan Jing, vice president of Huawei Cloud AI.

In recent years, Huawei Cloud AI has been utilized in various fields, including parking, road traffic monitoring, water quality monitoring and CT scans.