Can Cities Imagine Their Own Future?

Certain Measures is a Berlin- and Cambridge-based creative studio that designs spaces, experiences, and products that connect physical and digital realities.

It was founded by Andrew Witt and Tobias Nolte. They work between physical structure and bespoke software, bridging across mediums and scales to envision a brighter and more hopeful future.

In The Recombinant Room, projections of four urban spaces — a streetscape, landscape, interior, and underground — react to your presence.

As viewers approach, sensors shift the images from a human perspective to what Witt and Nolte describe as a “machine view” of the city.

A model scans the urban environments and produces an inventory of materials destined for demolition. It then imagines a chemical process of recombination, fusing them with biological materials to create entirely new composite artifacts.

Some of these imagined objects are displayed in vitrines within the installation, giving a tangible sense of AI’s creative potential.

The room’s final visualization depicts a future shaped by continuous and radical reuse. As Witt explains, “We can use AI to augment our understanding of the city and to think more comprehensively about the lifecycles of materials. The materials never really go away, they just go through transformations.”