Human beings can only sustain themselves through their connections with society. Society is, of course, made up of people. But beneath it lies something just as powerful: place.
Lately, I have found myself thinking more often about geopolitics. Whenever we hear about the devastation of war, we are reminded that the relationship between people and land runs far deeper than we usually realize. Borders. Cities. Hometowns. Occupied land. Lost cities. Human beings do not exist independently of place.
What the timespace ZINE team is attempting in Linz ultimately comes down to this: to read the relationship between people and place once again.
Recently, when we explain timespace, we have increasingly used a particular phrase: Turning the world into a magazine. It is a metaphor, but at the same time, it is also quite literal.
A building in front of you. A sign. An alley. A bridge. A factory. Graffiti. Things in the city that we would normally pass without a second thought—we photograph them with a smartphone. Using the image and location data as clues, AI connects what it sees with local databases, historical context, and cultural background, and turns what it discovers into a magazine article.
What we are attempting in Linz is an experiment in turning the city itself into a magazine. It is no coincidence that we chose Ars Electronica 2026, where technology and art intersect. Linz itself is a city that invites interpretation.
The prototype for this idea began in 2025 at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Even then, the question we were asking was very simple: How can we make the world itself structurally visible? How can we extract and define the structure of a city in a form that machines can read?
Today, an enormous industry is being built around generative AI: larger models, higher accuracy, and increasingly sophisticated reasoning capabilities. That is remarkable in itself. But what interests us is the part of the world that cannot be fully decoded by a world model alone.
Why is that particular sign on that particular street corner? What was this building before it became what it is today? What are the gathering places that are so ordinary to local people that no one thinks to explain them anymore? What industries once shaped the city, but have since disappeared?
War. Migration. Industry. Religion. Music. Everyday life. Politics. Every place contains countless layers of accumulated time.
What we are trying to build is not simply a smarter AI. We want to use AI to create an environment in which people can access knowledge that is specific to a particular place. You could call it publishing urban perception.
Even about the country I live in, there is an endless amount I do not know. Even about my own city, I understand only a fraction of its history and culture. That is how deep and complex the relationship between human society and place really is.
Of course, there are many other ways to travel. You can go to highly rated restaurants. Admire beautiful scenery. Visit famous landmarks. That is perfectly rational, and perfectly enjoyable. But once you discover the pleasure of looking at the world through AI as a lens, it becomes difficult to go back—because things that once seemed completely ordinary suddenly begin to contain stories.
I suspect this also has something to do with my own neurodiversity. I have strong ADHD-like tendencies. When I walk through a city, things completely unrelated to where I am supposed to be going constantly catch my attention. A plate on a wall. An old logo. A strange building. An abandoned railway track. An unusual name. One fragment sends my thoughts somewhere else entirely.
When I was working on augmented reality, I imagined a future in which countless layers of information would be overlaid on top of the city. But through building ZINE, I began to notice a slightly different possibility. What appears in ZINE is not simply another layer of information—a fragment of the city becomes a chain of context, a magazine article. And when those articles accumulate into a medium unique to that place, countless stories begin to emerge from the city.
A single sign can lead to the history of a company. The history of that company can lead to the history of urban infrastructure. Urban infrastructure can lead to postwar history. And eventually, the story returns to the street corner as it exists today.
The world does not become one enormous encyclopedia. It becomes a magazine unique to each city, capable of producing an endless stream of articles. That sensation was far more powerful than I had imagined.
In Linz, we do not want this experiment to remain inside an app. We will establish a temporary editorial office in the city, walk its streets, create articles, and edit them on site.
And we will distribute ZINE not only digitally, but also as a physical printed publication. Articles about the city, generated together with AI, will become material objects again and return to the city from which they emerged.
I still do not know where this experiment will ultimately lead. Will it become a new product? A new form of travel media? An urban archive? An educational tool? Or something that belongs to none of those categories?
There is, however, one outcome I know I want. I want to meet people who see this experiment and think: “I want to turn our city into a magazine, too.” I want to meet people who feel: “There is still something in our place that has not yet been read.”
That is why we are going to Linz. We will walk through the city, take photographs, read the streets together with AI, and turn what we discover into articles. Then we will make those articles into a magazine and return it to the city once again.
I do not yet know what will happen after that. And that is precisely why I am looking forward to Linz.
