In the noisy bars of contemporary large Chinese cities at night, young people sit around tables and “throw” gestures in the air as a form of playing social games. They engage in the rhythms and materialities of urban nightlife as a way of expressing their aesthetic pursuits and their notions of social power. Beyond entertainment, such activities are involved with multifaceted emotional and social layers of contemporary life, and they constitute culture – one that is not often understood, studied, or documented as such.

In Shenzhen’s Sea World in China’s Greater Bay Area, on reclaimed land, ocean-side promenades are set in front of impressive glass towers. Next to it lie container port, construction sites, and densely populated older areas. A rapidly built vision of Shenzhen’s future co-exists with traces from its various pasts. “High Sections / Low Leaps” is an audiovisual artwork that reconstructs actual and imagined development phases of China’s Greater Bay Area, one of the fastest developing areas on the planet. This artwork element, with the subtitle “Shenzhen’s Sea World Ocean Mall,” is an interactive scene rendered in a game engine, presented to the audience on two screens, showing otherworldly office towers that grow and shrink. 3D modeling, AI-generated facade elements, and spatial audio are employed to create dynamic audiovisual cityscape speculations. A camera tracks the number of spectators in proximity and switches the scene from past to future phases, allowing for subtle control over the work’s temporality. The artwork investigates how rapid urban development, such as in the Greater Bay Area, can be rendered perceptible for a public, fostering reflection on the relationship between new technologies (including GenAI) and imagined (and built) urban futures. At the intersection of computer graphics, data visualization, urbanism, creative technologies, spatial audio, and generative AI, this approach argues for a reflection on the consequences of human-technological collaboration in view of desired humane rather than technological outcomes. The pilot city Shenzhen holds significance for cities globally.

“A Grain of” is an art installation made by the authors: a small cube (25 x 25 x 25cm) of custom-made matter, sitting on a plinth, emitting sound from within. Its underlying idea is to take a “grain” from a dense, contemporary urban space and translate it into an art installation that makes the city experienceable for the audience. This small cube holds some of the material and sonic ecology of the city from which it stems embedded in it. In this paper, the authors describe the technical processes that they have used to sample and reinterpret the city’s material and sonic ecologies, including Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), 3d printing, field recording, and sound synthesis. They offer some theoretical notes towards the grain of the city in order to investigate how this process of technical translation produces an experience with affective, poetic, and speculative potential. They argue that this experience lets its audience critically rethink the old enduring binaries between natural and artificial or between the city and nature.