City Reverie

“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

A city is never defined solely by landmarks or architecture. It comes into being gradually through countless subtle and repeated acts of response. It exists in how people look at it, remember it, walk through it, and situate themselves within it. The “city” invoked in City Reverie does not refer to geographic boundaries, but to a narrative shaped by emotion and time — a process in which the individual and the collective experiences continually mirror one another in motion.
 

In the novel My City: A Hong Kong Story, Hong Kong writer Xi Xi portrayed the emerging urban consciousness of 1970s Hong Kong — a city learning to recognise itself as it grew. Today, however, when we speak of “My City”, the context has fundamentally shifted. What we face now is a city seeking equilibrium amid acceleration and continual restructuring, a landscape oscillating between disappearance and becoming. Thus, the curatorial project City Reverie is not an act of nostalgic return, but an inquiry into the present and the future. While it continues the discourse of “Reimagines Heritage”, it moves beyond preservation or archiving, and instead asks how we move alongside a city in perpetual transformation — how we listen to changes still unfolding, and how we forge renewed emotional connections within that flux.
 

Hong Kong’s landscape is in constant transition. Traditions may be reinterpreted, structures replaced, surfaces renewed. Yet what truly constructs a city is not the material objects, but how we respond to them. Perhaps it is the sudden familiarity that surfaces when walking down an old street one afternoon; perhaps it is the resonance felt during a festival ritual; or perhaps it is the memory of an era awakened by the sweetness of a pineapple bun. In the exhibition, the hand-drawn map and icons created by media artist Vvzela Kook are not a reproduction of a cultural inventory, but an emotional interface. Through the immediacy of online media, audiences enter layered urban temporalities via interactive navigation. Though virtual, the digital space becomes a field where experience can drift, reorganise, and be reimagined. These icons include cultural fragments that still exist as well as material traces that now belong to memory. They stand at the intersection of private keepsakes and collective remembrance, at the threshold between presence and absence. As audiences traverse the virtual map and engage in dialogue with others, what they encounter is not merely research material or cultural information, but a renewed conversation between self and city — a process of re-situating oneself through the act of looking.
 

If Xi Xi’s My City: A Hong Kong Story narrates the coming-of-age of a city, then City Reverie gazes instead through the lens of deep time. Within media art discourse, “Deep Time” refers not only to geological and cosmological scales, but to a way of re-seeing technology and history. It reminds us that what we call cutting-edge digital civilisation is built upon ancient geological strata. The rare-earth metals that compose our screens, sensors, and computational devices originate in tectonic movements billions of years old. Human technological development — which we call modern — is but a fleeting fragment within vast temporal expanses. Seen through deep time, digital devices cease to function merely as symbols of the future; they become extensions of the Earth’s material history, moments of encounter between humans, minerals, and cosmic temporality. In Deep Time of the Media, German theorist Siegfried Zielinski proposes the framework of Media Archaeology, arguing that technological history is not a linear narrative of progress, but a constellation of forgotten, divergent, and interrupted possibilities. Contemporary digital technology, therefore, should not be understood as an endpoint, but as one provisional formation among many historical branches — the result of intersecting imaginations and inventions.
 

Within this framework, City Reverie, supported by Upmood’s Emotion Tracking Technology, does not simply employ technology as a tool. Rather, it establishes a dialogue between geological time, technical history, and urban memory. Hong Kong’s present moment thus becomes not merely a slice of urban renewal, but a flash within deep time.
 

As Walter Benjamin suggests, “Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.” When audiences’ biometric data are translated and integrated into the creative process, personal emotions become embedded within a larger temporal structure. Ephemeral sensations transform into visible and audible traces. The city begins to respond; the past appears within the present. This response forms a resonant mode of interaction, allowing technology to function as an instrument for sensing time and emotion rather than as a cold apparatus. Emotion here is no longer confined to private experience; it becomes part of the urban landscape — a pulse within data and sound.
 

The project unfolds in two interconnected components: exhibition and performance. The exhibition opens dialogues between individuals and between individuals and the city; the performance becomes a collective field of resonance.

Through the collaboration with media artist Vvzela Kook, Music Director Fung Lam, and Artistic Director Silver Cheung, the stage becomes a site where perception, memory, and technology interact. Layers of music interweave on stage. Digital imagery and data visualisation trace temporal trajectories. Processed urban fragments move between past and future. Audience data becomes the material for composing the final segment of music and visual output, dissolving the notion of single authorship and allowing the work to be co-generated in real time. The concluding chapter of the performance is not a predetermined composition, but a singular work translated from collective emotion within a specific time and space. It comes into being and reaches completion only in that moment. It cannot be replicated — only remembered — much like the formation of memory itself.
 

Reverie is a state between wakefulness and dream, and a willingness to remain responsive amid the flow of life. City Reverie is not a fixed place, but a relationship — a condition of mutual reflection layered across time. As the world accelerates, as technology permeates daily life, as cities cycle through demolition and reconstruction, are we still willing to pause within the fissures of deep time and listen? When emotion is quantified into data, when memory is translated into light and sound, do we still remember that original sensation?
 

Perhaps a city has never belonged to anyone; it is continually redefined through each act of seeing and feeling. Within this flow that traverses geological and human time, we may eventually come to understand that a city awakens through response and is endlessly rewritten between memory and anticipation. The future, meanwhile, is already quietly taking shape in this very moment, like all things growing.