Good Bye Hamburg

Video

GOOD BYE HAMBURG is a performative audio walk through Hamburg’s HafenCity, staged with the AI-based app “Climate Future : Image Generator” [CF:IG]. It unfolds a fiction set in 2050, when a new species, Cyane, establishes itself in the redeveloped harbour district. Participants follow a guided route through Europe’s largest inner-city development project while the app translates climate data and site-specific prompts into generated images. The walk asks what conditions allow an invasive organism to grow, what it displaces, and how rising water and an accelerating climate crisis reshape the urban ecology of the near future.

The tour moves between science and fiction. Climate projections for the HafenCity provide the frame; the app’s image generator turns the audience’s responses into a shifting visual narrative that overlays the real district with a speculative one. Each tour produces its own sequence of images, so the work treats climate modelling as material for public imagination rather than a fixed forecast. Storytelling, machine learning and urban climate data are assembled into a walkable apparatus that participants complete by moving through the city.

GOOD BYE HAMBURG was developed at the City Science Lab of HafenCity Universität Hamburg with the MIT Media Lab and Lichthof Theater, within the CityClimate meets CreativeCoding programme. Fabiola Kuonen initiated the project and led directing, text and performance; Ilja Mirsky led dramaturgy and the project; Meredith Thomas worked as creative technologist; Jakob Wierzba designed the app and wrote its code; Julius Gervelmeyer contributed the technical concept; Sean Keller acted as outside eye; and Lorin Brockhaus composed the music. The project is funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, HafenCity Universität Hamburg, the Hamburg Behörde für Kultur und Medien, Hamburg Kreativgesellschaft and the Centre for Urban Science & Policy at TU Delft. It returned in June 2024 as a revival at the Fringify – Independent Arts Festival Hamburg.

An essay by Hilke Marit Berger, scientific director of the City Science Lab, places the project within a wider argument about artistic responsibility and transformation knowledge. GOOD BYE HAMBURG ends by leaving its images unfinished, a near future the audience has already begun to picture.