Honorable Mention
2016 Skyscraper Competition
Joseph Konrad Kosmas Schneider, Vincent Johann Moller
Germany
The 22nd Century – Humankind succeeded in avoiding the dangers of the 21st century’s Technological Singularity. Through great efforts and extensive preparation the crucial moment of the awakening of a self-improving Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) could be predicted and controlled. Mankind was able to stay the most powerful yet not the most intelligent species on the planet while ASI became its god-like slave – forever bound to serve humanity in its needs.
Induced by ASI, unimaginable, all-embracing progress throughout the entire research was achieved, lifting the human state of knowledge to uncharted heights.
Step by step the human biological body was technically modified. Biological evolution merged with technology. Human communication changed into the medium of electromagnetic radiation, eventually the human mind was transcended into technical units and merged with ASI. A total integration happened. The human body was, through the immortality of its digital mind, eventually made redundant. Although physical reality is the basis of everything, being in it became obsolete. The shift of human reality from the physical to the digital world was completed.
The appearance of this digital world is beyond our current understanding of time and space – its only dimension is the speed of communication, the speed of data transfer. Cartesian locations loose their importance. The digital world is not a world of movement – it is a world of calling up.
Since being in this digital world differs entirely from human’s former nature, a new desire towards the physical reality arose at a certain point. Just like humanist artists used to depict the ideal ancient landscape of Arcadia in their paintings, mankind made the physical world into their world of NEW ARCADIA. For reasons of nostalgia human minds would then materialize into a favored biological body to experience this physical world`s truth.
The Tower of New Arcadia situates everything that used to constitute human life. It defines a place where people can meet and enjoy the beauty of physical world’s sensations.
A place of touch, sight, sound, smell and taste.
A place of pristine human interaction and feeling.
To stroll our so called Real World.
