HYPERHABITAT is a research project which explores the potential of information technology to reorganise the habitability of the world. From a single small object to the planet itself.

HYPERHABITAT, reprogramming the world is the biggest Internet Zero network ever built.

Hyperhabitat. Reprogramming the World is an installation directed by Vicente Guallart and produced for the 11th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, curated by Aaron Betsky under the title Out There: Architecture Beyond Building.

For the development of the project, Guallart Architects, the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and Bestiario have created a consortium to address the various aspects of the proposal.

The project engages with the theme of the Biennale by posting the need to reprogramme the structures with which we inhabit the world through the introduction of distributed intelligence in the nodes, networks and environments with which we construct buildings, cities and territories.

The installation includes the construction of a house with shared spaces made of methacrylates with embedded microservers, which interact with one another to generate relationships that are displayed as a large-format projection on which line codes can be drawn to suggest relationships or ‘line codes’ between nodes. In addition, a special web platform was launched, which enables people around the world to put forward formulas for reprogramming the world.

The project incorporates key recent developments in digital manufacturing, the created of Internet Zero (a new microserver technology developed at MIT to generate ambient intelligence by linking a series of miniature computers) and the theory of the multiscale habitat, an ‘urban genome’ project developed at IAAC that seeks to introduce new approaches to the generation of buildings and cities by restructuring the functional relationships between the constituent parts.