Current: Platform for Urban Archive

Provides Ng, Eli Joteva, Artem Konevskikh, Ya Nzi (Hong Kong / Russia / LA / Bulgaria, 2021)

One of the challenges for urban archiving is an abundance of data with no simple and economic way to structure and extract useful information. ‘Current’ stands at the convergence of livestream data, volumetric reconstruction, and AI image processing into a distributed media platform that reconstruct and preserve moments of our built environment using technologies that are readily available to any individuals for democratisation – a participatory urban archive. The quality of our built environment is often assessed through records in architectural archives. Yet, traditional architectural archives do not include records of occupants and events but only drawings and models of buildings, which does not give a comprehensive overview of the qualities and impacts of the design. Livestream data from media platforms often consist of information about our built environment and its events. How can architects utilise livestream data to archive, reconstruct and preserve moments of our built environment in realtime to support future architectural research and studies?