MEET in Europe | STARTS in the City

MEET has a dense program of international projects and an equally dense network of relationships with more than thirty cultural centers throughout Europe, in an ongoing reflection on digital art and culture as drivers of social, cultural, and economic innovation.

International projects are an opportunity for MEET to experiment with actions that anticipate the future of the human/technology relationship and integrate its vision by including critical and creative thinking on the issues of sustainability, inclusiveness, interdisciplinary and participatory innovation, consistent with the values of the New European Bauhaus.

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The project S+T+ARTS in the City, in which MEET is a partner together with Gluon (Brussels), Ars Electronica (Linz), Kersnikova (Ljubljana), Hac Te (Barcelona), INOVA + (Porto), is currently underway.

The planned artist residencies kick off in October. The two challenges promoted by MEET have Artificial Intelligence as their main theme, and the selected artists are asked to answer two fundamental questions:

How can we use AI to understand the needs and desires of a city and translate them into possible solutions?

This residency challenges us to think about the concept of the city in the Koinocene era: a new era of interconnection between humans, other life forms, and nonliving entities, including AI. Artificial Intelligence as a detector of collective memories and desires with the potential to imagine new forms of well-being for the city. It could be the city of Milan or any other metropolis questioning itself and Italo Calvino’s dream of invisible or subtle cities, a dream born from the heart of unjust cities that could become visible and happy thanks to insights provided by AI. “Cities are a collection of many things: of memory, of desires, of signs of a language; cities are places of exchange, as all books on the history of economics explain, but these exchanges are not only exchanges of goods, they are exchanges of words, of desires, of memories… We want to reveal happy cities that continually take shape and disappear, hidden in unhappy cities.” (Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities). Read more by clicking here.

Come possiamo combinare Intelligenza Artificiale e Intelligenza umana per attivare processi di rigenerazione urbana?

Instead of relying on the extraction and exploitation of scarce resources to sustain technologies, humans can exploit the critical minerals or materials already present in urban environments, mining them in a way that embodies a sense of caring. On the other hand, there is an urgent need to discover new materials that can replace rare minerals that are expensive to extract. Artificial intelligence can play a central role in facilitating this symbiotic relationship, helping to identify hidden resources within cities and enabling circular processes to regenerate them. The regional reference context is a large city in northern Italy (this could be Milan, Trieste, Turin) that holds significant reserves of materials that give value to machines, products, and processes. This context provides an opportunity to reflect on material intelligence and symbiotic processes between nature, artificial intelligence, and human intelligence as part of the one big “intelligence” of the city. These cities can become mines of materials, knowledge and data, activating circular processes of self-regeneration facilitated by AI. Read more by clicking here.