In India today, the aesthetics of the smart city, an aesthetics of global commerce and an internationally focused middle class, are stripping away the locally specific detail and character of the urban fabric. The life of old Indian cities is being cleansed and sanitized in favour of glossy smooth surfaces. Urban smart technology systems operate most effectively in a context of defined regularized geometries and calibration points. Lens and scanners require simplification for precision and efficiency. The project explores how some of these emerging technologies of the smart city can be repurposed to bring the spaces of the spiritual, ornamentation, detail and eccentricity back into the urban landscape. The rhetoric of the smart city as a system of optimization and efficiency is reimagined and those technologies that shape it are developed for their mythic potential.

The project takes, as a case study, a speculative Old Mumbai, a city that was left behind as one hundred new smart cities were built from the ground up in India during the first half of the XX Century. The city was retrofit with scaffoldings and lidar scanners in the attempt to keep up with the AR and IT systems of newer cities and maintain their population. Old facades are wrapped in a saffron fabric skin, removing architectural articulation, clutter and noise, in order to optimize the legibility of technology systems.

DevAI is an augmented reality street festival through which we explore this universe. It the story of embracing of the central role that technology will take in our cities, while using it as a tool of preservation of culture. Ornament and surface intricacy will prevail in our urban fabric, only if it is in virtual form. Our fables of yesterday that serve us today, will evolve in new mediums so they can be told tomorrow. Technology will then be a catalyst of metaphysical experiences, heavenly visions, otherworldly acid trips, and most importantly, a capsule of cultural preservation.