In partnership with Creative Director Karen Vanderborght, generated funding (Canada Media Fund, Canada Council), exhibitions (Myseum of Toronto) and helped build an inter-disciplinary team for the first phase of this ambitious new media adventure.

Nuville is an augmented walking game, co-created by humans and machines (AI) in a series of hackathons, and realized through walking tours at different urban locations.

Nuville is an augmented walking game, co-created by humans and machines (AI) in a series of hackathons, and realized through walking tours at different urban locations.

Nuville is an automated city, planned and constructed by an AI which in itself is not evil, nor good. The city assets of Nuville have been handed to anonymous private holdings which put profitability before livability. But the city’s AI can be fed with new sets of instructions and maybe, when taking more opinions into account, provide solutions we humans haven’t thought of.

You are a member of the urban guerrilla who hacks into the builders’ AI. You feed it anomalies of beauty, free space and human nature to change the its construction plans. Whimsical instructions guide you, and visual data crumbs of a parallel city are there for you to be hacked and proposed as possible futures. The soundtrack in your ears combines a science fiction story with current content from your real-life city like weather forecasts, local radio stations, and available open city data. The story changes according to your actions and those of your fellow urban avatars. Together you generate data interferences causing augmented distortions on each other’s smartphones, and maybe even in the real world around you. Nuville is a wicked casual walking game which will make you laugh green. Some things are bigger than you. The city is your playground.