THERE was a lot of futuristic hype surrounding cryonics company Alcor. When Dublin-based journalist Mark O鈥機onnell travelled to its facility in Arizona, he found himself 鈥渟urrounded by corpses in an office park, between a tile showroom and a place called Big D鈥檚 Covering Supplies鈥�.

In his book To Be a Machine, new father O鈥機onnell invokes the twin spectres of death and child-bearing in an attempt to make sense of his subject 鈥� but he also manages to be staggeringly funny. He explores the intersecting practices of body modification, cryonics, machine learning, whole brain emulation and AI disaster-forecasting.

The 鈥渢ranshumanist world view鈥�, O鈥機onnell writes, casts 鈥渙ur minds and bodies as obsolete technologies, outmoded formats in need of complete overhaul鈥�. He worries more about the collateral damage such a future will inflict, less on the world views of the supposed visionaries who supply the ideas. Not that the two can be separated.

Throughout the text, it is difficult to ignore Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire and an adviser to Donald Trump. While Thiel, , is not featured directly, the longevity start-ups he funded are, including Halcyon Molecular, 3Scan, MIRI, the Longevity Fund and Aubrey de Grey鈥檚 Methuselah Foundation.

Another pervasive presence is Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher. But while Thiel wants to extend life, Bostrom is worried about its eradication. He is best known for his 2014 book Superintelligence, which brought thought experiments about AI security to public notice. O鈥機onnell finds it disquieting to see the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Gates effusing about this book. 鈥淭hese dire warnings about AI were coming from what seemed like the most unlikely of sources: not from Luddites or religious catastrophists, that is, but from the very people who seemed to most personify our culture鈥檚 reverence for machines.鈥�

鈥淭he race to achieve AI first will be tight, pushing corporations to disregard security鈥�

attempts to address such existential threats by freely disseminating its research. This is meant to encourage the rise ofmultiple AIs, whose balance of power will keep any non-benign ones off-balance. While Bostrom agrees that this plan will decrease the threat from a world-eating 鈥渟ingleton鈥�, that 鈥渨inning the AI race is incompatible with using any safety method that incurs a delay or limits performance鈥�. If basic information is made public, the race to achieve AI first will be tight, pushing corporations to disregard security.

Given Musk鈥檚 that he is trying to move Trump to the left, rumours that Mark Zuckerberg is considering a presidential run and the fact that many users are deleting the Uber app after the company broke the taxi strike at JFK Airport, Silicon Valley can no longer claim to be apolitical. And there seems to be something about transhumanism that draws out reactionaries. As O鈥機onnell observes, in one sense the whole ethos of transhumanism 鈥渋s such a radical extrapolation of the classically American belief in self-betterment that it obliterates the idea of the self entirely. It鈥檚 liberal humanism forced to the coldest outer limits of its own paradoxical implications.鈥�

Thiel is 鈥� strangely for a former libertarian 鈥� a planner. In his 2014 book Zero to One, Thiel writes of the dot-com bubble as both 鈥渁 peak of insanity鈥� and 鈥渁 peak of clarity鈥�: 鈥淧eople looked into the future, saw how much valuable new technology we would need to get there safely and judged themselves capable of creating it.鈥� Depicting how private enterprise failed to bridge the gap between aspiration and realisation, Thiel seems here to be arguing for total mobilisation of the state.

Shooting for the moon

Thiel favours taking huge risks to achieve miraculous results. He champions the government-funded space race and rails against 鈥渋ncrementalisation鈥� in scientific and civilizational achievements. At the time of writing, , the managing director of Thiel鈥檚 Mithril Capital, is one of Trump鈥檚 main candidates to head the Food and Drug Administration. O鈥橬eill thinks that drugs should be approved not by safety but by efficacy. Thiel himself has criticised the FDA for being overly cautious, , 鈥淚 don鈥檛 even know if you could get the polio vaccine approved today鈥� 鈥� .

If the low-safety 鈥渕oonshot鈥� approach favoured by Thiel and the futurist frat houses O鈥機onnell describes is applied on a national level, and longevity research funded by a Silicon Valley billionaire does pay huge dividends, a new question emerges: immortality for whom?

Thiel is notoriously anti-competition, writing in Zero to One that only becoming a monopoly 鈥渃an allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival鈥�, since 鈥渃ompetitive markets destroy profits鈥�. A monopoly price for life extension suggests a future in which we will all be in monetary debt to mortality, working forever to pay off our incoming years.

During a recent public lecture, genomics pioneer Craig Venter discussed his new company that aims to use genetic sequencing to provide 鈥減roactive, preventative, predictive, personalised鈥� healthcare. According to Venter, 40 per cent of people who think they are healthy are not 鈥� they have undiagnosed ailments such as tumours that have not metastasised or cardiovascular conditions. And he says his method can predict Alzheimer鈥檚 20 years before its onset, and a cocktail of soon-to-be-marketed drugs can prevent it. Thanks to this $25,000 genome-physical, Venter himself was .

Can any imaginable public healthcare provision pay for such speculative treatments? Or will there be a widening gap between those who can afford to stay healthy and those who will have to shoulder early-onset penury in the face of their time-limited humanity?

In response to questions about such inequality, Thiel offers little comfort. 鈥淧robably the most extreme form of inequality,鈥� six years ago, 鈥渋s between people who are alive and people who are dead.鈥�

Jonathan Swift鈥檚 satirical letter 鈥淎 modest proposal鈥� responded to an equally cold-blooded ideology, in his day. But a field whose pioneers sport names like T. O. Morrow (Tom Bell鈥檚 1990s soubriquet), FM-2030 and Max More demands something different from O鈥機onnell 鈥� an unexpected, often funny effort of restraint.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淚n debt to mortality鈥�

The Gruen transfer was once a uniquely American phenomenon. Named for Victor Gruen, the Austrian-born architect who designed the first indoor climate-controlled shopping mall, the Gruen transfer occurs when people, entering a space designed to be visually disorientating, are confused into a state of unplanned consumption. Their desire to purchase one thing, say, a birthday card, has been transferred, against their will, and in a deliberate, even predictable way onto a slew of entirely different items. An iced caramel mochaccino. A pair of trainers. A rubber Totoro smartphone cover. While shopping malls aren鈥檛 necessarily thriving now in the US, the mall concept has spread around the world, and the Gruen transfer with it. It鈥檚 not stretching the definition too far to see it at work on the landing pages of shopping websites like Amazon.

It鈥檚 as a direct response to the malling of the Arab Gulf states that the Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria has created her video installation Black Friday (pictured above), on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Al-Maria filmed Black Friday in the as-yet unopened . This massive structure (patterned after the , a sumptuous 19th-century proto-mall in Milan) is presented in soaring, swooping shots, empty of kiosks, stores or branding. There are, however, mannequins, often bathed in dayglow, observing Al-Maria鈥檚 characters as they traverse its corridors, wait passively on its escalators, or lie prone under its dome. Sweeping, aerial sections shot from drones achieve a disturbing sort of weightlessness: the vulnerable smallness of her figures, splayed on gilt floors or huddled on luxurious stairs, is painfully apparent. The drones鈥� inhuman camera movements are more than disorientating: they鈥檙e surreal. In one shot, the camera trails a father-son couple as if nipping at their ankles, then jerks upward at an awkward, neck-breaking angle.

Watching Black Friday is like playing a video game in Explore mode. The sense of one鈥檚 own impotence develops slowly but relentlessly. Al-Maria鈥檚 subjects are so passive they might be extras in some other film; the only way they could be active is if stores were open. As such, Black Friday presents a perversion of the Gruen transfer, a confusion which cannot lead to purchase. As the authoritative voiceover (by the actor Sam Neill) informs us, 鈥淗ere, there is nothing to ingest, but to be ingested by.鈥� The cumulative effect 鈥� accentuated by the SF doom music blaring so loud that the bass shakes the screen 鈥� is apocalyptic.

鈥淚nner space is no longer a neat literary metaphor for alienation. Thanks to mobile technology, it has become virtual real estate鈥�

Gruen鈥檚 trailblazing mall opened in 1956 in Minnesota 鈥� known for its frigid winters, partially to address the locals鈥� desire for 鈥渋deal shopping weather鈥�. As temperatures rise the world over, it makes sense that we retreat further and further into the self-contained world of malls.

Step outdoors in the Gulf in summer, and you will quickly understand why air-conditioned malls have been a presence here at least since the 1990s. In her 2012 memoir , Al-Maria remembers their centrality to courtship: 鈥淭here was an intense energy of longing and desire that hung over the long strips of mall corridors, and it had nothing to do with what was displayed in the windows of the shops.鈥� If this sentence has a J. G. Ballard ring about it, well, the resemblance is deliberate. Exploring a region 鈥渋nformed in equal parts by Islam and postmodernity鈥�, Al-Maria unabashedly reaches for the tools of science fiction. In her essay she writes about the 鈥渋nner space鈥� first colonised by Ballard and Philip K. Dick: that charged, mythic territory we project on to an outwardly anonymous urban landscape. Inner space is no longer a neat literary metaphor for alienation. Thanks to mobile technology, it has become virtual real estate. Al-Maria recounts the 鈥渇lourishing of private worlds鈥� enabled by 鈥渞igid public rules鈥�, and in particular the way mobile devices 鈥� jawal in the Gulf 鈥� 鈥渕ake clandestine communication possible鈥�. Arranged in front of Black Friday is Litany, a collection of scattered jawal flickering on a mound of sand. Their screens, often shattered, give off a faint, disquieting buzz or screech meaningless background noise as they loop snippets of commercials or junk entertainment (pictured below).

Al-Maria writes in her memoir that her first visual memories of her father are of a video cassette he sent from Qatar, which opens with 鈥渁 speeding shot from a car in the desert鈥�. This video was 鈥渁 portal into another dimension 鈥� one I felt immediate ownership over鈥� seeing the video permanently cracked the world into two halves for me.鈥� These two halves, so apparently dissimilar, are united by the technologies of mall and jawal. Al-Maria has offered us an invitation to step into another dimension: one which none of us has any ownership over.

[exhibition_info title=鈥滲lack Friday鈥� title_link=鈥漢ttp://whitney.org/Exhibitions/SophiaAlMaria鈥� gallery=鈥漌hitney Museum of American Art鈥� location=鈥漀ew York City鈥� fromdate=鈥漬ow鈥� todate=鈥�31 October 2016鈥砞

鈥淒ata is public in the same way the White House is.鈥�

So said Jer Thorp, , 听in an 鈥淎I Now鈥� workshop on 7 July organised by the White House鈥檚 Office of Science and Technology Policy. 听Thorp meant to highlight the uncertain ownership status of our personal data. He might just as well have been referring to the inscrutability of the White House itself: AI now?

This was the final session in the White House鈥檚 series exploring the uses of artificial intelligence and their implications. But why, in the final months of Barack Obama鈥檚 administration, and faced with a host of social and environmental problems, is the focus on artificial intelligence?

It鈥檚 natural to imagine that this is just a spot of legacy-burnishing from a president who made the drone strike integral to his country鈥檚 foreign policy. Is the White House simply hitching itself to the current AI hype cycle, or does it actually have a position on the subject? The answer seems to be neither. It looks as though the US government genuinely does not know what its position should be, and is trying to learn as much as possible, as fast as possible 鈥� a vision that鈥檚 as strategically disconcerting as it is intellectually admirable.

There is a great deal of anxiety here. The White House鈥檚 on big data, published in May, highlighted the way data, algorithmically processed, can worsen social discrimination. Ask an expert system a mean-spirited or wrong-headed question, and it will surely answer in the same spirit.

Kate Crawford, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, pressed the point in the first AI Now workshop in May, citing a recent article about .

Worthy of Monty Python

The next session also focused on the real-world implications of high-level processing. You could unclog city congestion, track bird flight, or anticipate police brutality. Here too, we had a barn-burning speech by Roy Austin, of the White House Domestic Policy Council, explaining the myriad problems the criminal justice system faces in exploiting big data: 鈥淲e are not ready for machine learning,鈥� he said, also emphasising that it would accentuate racial bias.

But though the conclusion of the White House鈥檚 report called for 鈥渁ccountability mechanisms鈥� to address the problem of discrimination, its suggestions are weak beer indeed: 鈥淓ncourage market participants to design the best algorithmic systems鈥�, it says, exhibiting a faux naivety worthy of Monty Python.

Across the series, little distinction was made between AI, machine learning and advanced algorithmic processing. Questions of cognition, consciousness, personhood and potential citizenship were not explored. Few speakers bothered to mention that a potential AI might quite likely approach problems in a distinctively non-human manner and so be able to tackle problems that humans seem utterly unable to grapple with (climate change, for instance).

The determined if slightly muddled focus on the here and now was a relief in some ways. At least attendees did not have to sit through yet another retelling of Nick Bostrom鈥檚 deeply paranoid Superintelligence (2014), which warns of the rise of a 鈥�singleton鈥�, defined as 鈥渟ome form of agency that can solve all major global coordination problems鈥�.

A kind of corporate-hacktivist ethos permeated the most recent session, and an atmosphere of quiet positivity. No one felt any pressing need to ask Yann LeCun, now director of AI Research at Facebook, how much fun he was having, playing with all the data he now has access to. Latanya Sweeney, professor of government and technology at Harvard University, and a computer scientist, noted that she seemed to be the only techno-pessimist in the room.

It is heartening that federal government, at least in its current guise, is speaking plainly about the failures of the criminal justice system. But dire warnings, without proscriptive legislation or executive orders, do little. For instance, whistle-blowing news site The Intercept has revealed that the .

Worryingly, it appears that the White House called a conference on AI primarily so that it could warn people that AI should not be allowed anywhere near some sections of government. As one colleague remarked, 鈥淭his shows you how scared they are about this happening.鈥�

Brendan Byrne is a writer and critic based in New York

Megacities Asia, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, responds ambitiously to the recent . It does so by focusing on the way artists have reacted to changes in their home cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Delhi, Mumbai and Seoul. There are no computer renderings of the latest record-breaking skyscrapers or interpretations of transformed skylines. The pieces here, created between 2003 and 2016, squarely challenge a new era of urban development.

In Yin Xiuzhen鈥檚 Temperature, scraps of clothing belonging to evicted tenants sprout from the rubble of their destroyed homes. Another Beijing resident, Song Dong, constructed a hutong, a vanishing style of courtyard house, usually self-built, for Wisdom of the Poor: Living with Pigeons. Hu Xiangcheng鈥檚 Doors Away from Home 鈥� Doors Back Home is a huge structure mostly composed of doors salvaged from Ming- and Qing-dynasty homes, which were dismantled during Shanghai鈥檚 early 1990s construction boom. (, only 22 per cent of Chinese homes were built before 2000.) Like many of the exhibition鈥檚 pieces, Doors is meant to be explored: you walk between miniature rooms, negotiating unexpected angles and finding yourself in strange hidey-holes, confronted by family photographs pasted just at eye level. As the curators write in the introduction, 鈥淢egacities are not only seen, but also felt.鈥�

Asim Waqif鈥檚 Venu (2012) takes the immersion of the museum patron to another level. A bamboo playground that reacts to your presence with bird calls or mechanical purring, the piece also doubles as cage. You don鈥檛 notice this until you鈥檙e inside, while other patrons stalk its edges, videoing your exploits with their phones. Should we read Waqif鈥檚 use of bamboo, the traditional vernacular housing material, as a reaction to the idea of the oh-so-modern (and oh-so-governable) 鈥渟mart city鈥�?

Gilded present, broken past

India is embarking on a project to make 100 smart cities. These cities, much like Songdo in South Korea or Masdar in the UAE, will be built completely from scratch. New technologies woven through their infrastructure will quantify daily routines and engineer social spaces from the top down. Existing cities already have systems, developed ad hoc over years by a free citizenry, and many of the artists fear these ways of life are now being threatened by the idea of the city as a fully-planned, closed system. Hema Upadhyay鈥檚 8鈥� x 12鈥� is a walk-in box featuring mini-aerial views of Mumbai on its walls and ceiling, which are barnacled with shingle roofs, mosque domes, church spires and bulbous satellite dishes, all made from the same materials local families use to build their homes. This is a different kind of map from the one you will see on Google Earth, or on the Uber app you boot up the second you鈥檙e off the plane.

Not all of these pieces view technology in a negative light. Waqif incorporates sensors into Venu, and Han Seok Hyun鈥檚 Super-Natural glories in the technologies we use to preserve and recycle the stuff we consume. Suspiciously green and healthy-looking trash has been sourced both from Seoul and Boston: disposable packets of green tea, plastic bottles of soju, bear-like cartoony figures, feather dusters, plastic army men and bottles of (where the artist was in residency last year). Up close, as this is all soon-to-be-recycled junk, but from a distance, the piece begins to acquire a splendid nobility. Aaditi Joshi鈥檚 Untitled resembles a huge aquatic life form, for whom a pollution-choked canal would presumably be a nourishing medium. Headless, eyeless and gill-less, it is gorgeously coloured without being garish and is constructed from plastic bags. If you lie on your back underneath and look up into its belly, you鈥檒l be rewarded with a glimpse of its spine, lit by LEDs.

While most of the exhibits are grouped together in one central location, half a dozen others are larded throughout the museum, meaning that seeing the entire exhibition is a bit of a hike. It was on this long, tangled search that I encountered Yee Sookyung鈥檚 , an alien, soft-green-blue globular growth of broken ceramics held together by golden epoxy. It鈥檚 not part of the exhibit, and yet this massive, closed vase seemed the perfect capstone to it: a melding of the gilded present and the broken past.

Megacities Asia runs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston until 17 July

听runs at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City from 5 February to 1 May 2016.

Images taken from line the entrance at Astro Noise, the first solo exhibition by film-maker Laura Poitras.

But the show, at New York鈥檚 Whitney Museum of American Art, doesn鈥檛 hit high gear until you find yourself in the dark. There, you are confronted by a massive screen playing slow-motion footage of civilians gazing on the wreckage of the World Trade Center shortly after the attacks on 11 September 2001.

As the distorted soundtrack unwinds 鈥� the US national anthem, sung at a World Series baseball game that November 鈥� it occurs to you that the people you鈥檙e watching behaved in much the same way as you are now. Heads twist from side to side as they try to read meaning in the twisted material before them. Already, you feel implicated.

On the reverse side of the two鈥搒ided screen, two interrogations of Afghan prisoners loop endlessly, mixing the rattle of their chains to the still-audible national anthem. The faces of the US guards are obscured by digital smears, masks or shadows. We see the supposed militants quite clearly: soon they will be transported to Guantanamo Bay.

听A way of life

Astro Noise is, on the surface, yet another show about surveillance in which the artist makes visible the technologies that track, record and catalogue us. But Poitras, who regularly collaborates with Trevor Paglen, New York鈥檚 other celebrated artist of the 鈥渄eep state鈥�, is more interested in her audience. Closed-circuit video, mobile-phone sniffers, infrared cameras: for Poitras, these are not neutral devices, but infect all they touch. Astro Noise reveals how easily we naturalise this technology, accepting it as necessary kit for an art show or a political system 鈥� even, by implication, for our way of life.

In the next installation, you can lie on your back and stare at time-lapse projections of night skies in Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen, where drones flit like tracer fire as the stars shift fluidly above. You feel at once both totally exposed 鈥� a sensation heightened by the radio chatter of drone pilots 鈥� and perfectly secure, your anonymity guaranteed in the darkness.(Don鈥檛 get comfortable: the title of this piece, Bed Down Location, is military terminology for where a targeted person sleeps.)

Poitras, who is best known for her , took the title Astro Noise from the name of an encrypted file Snowden gave her that contained evidence of mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency. The film won her an Oscar.

In stark contrast, the 8 minutes and 16 seconds of footage that make up her next installation 鈥� shot on an Iraqi family鈥檚 rooftop while US forces engaged militants nearby 鈥� made her the subject of a 鈥渃lassified national-security investigation鈥�. FBI documents on the incident line the walls. The footage of November 20, 2004 (which no one in the federal government ever requested to see) shows nothing pertaining to the security of the US, but rather focuses on some civilians trying and failing to see what鈥檚 going on down in the street.

Being watched

Poitras writes in the show鈥檚 catalogue that she is interested in the visitor as a 鈥減rotagonist鈥�. She鈥檚 not kidding. As you leave the show, two screens reveal that the exhibition has had you, the museum-goer, under surveillance. The first screen displays the live feed from an infrared camera positioned directly above the supine patrons of Bed Down Location. As they get up and leave, their heat signatures cling to the platform. You are complicit in their surveillance, yet the temptation to linger is strong.

The second screen, Last Seen, is a running list of the specs and Wi-Fi activity of every mobile phone and device carried through the exhibition.

Afterwards, should you find yourself in need of fresh air and a bit of space, you can wander out onto the Whitney鈥檚 series of interlocking decks and balconies, and stare at the new, gleaming World Trade Center. It appears to inhabit an entirely different America to the one you were just immersed in.

You wonder if that鈥檚 true.

Bahamas Internet Cable System (BICS-1) NSA/GCHQ-Tapped Undersea Cable Atlantic Ocean, 2015 (Image: Trevor Paglen/Metro Pictures)

Huge photographs of undersea telecommunications cables don鈥檛 seem the most obvious choice for an exclusive gallery located in the Chelsea area of New York City. But as the light shifts in the stark white gallery space, these pieces prove murkily gorgeous, the cables melting into their green and black background.

Columbus III NSA/GCHQ-Tapped Undersea Cable Atlantic Ocean, 2015 (Image: Trevor Paglen/Metro Pictures)

They are part of solo show at Metro Pictures. A geographer turned artist and campaigner, Paglen has a noble purpose, focusing on the technology and infrastructure of national security. His equally striking pictures of the coastlines of major cities, photographed in obscure hazes of white and blue, and juxtaposed with highly technical maps, carry a clearer didactic meaning.

NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, New York City, New York, United States, 2015 (Image: Trevor Paglen/Metro Pictures)

The San Diego-San Francisco map has its part of the Southern Cross Cable 鈥� a trans-Pacific telecommunications network 鈥� stitched into its centre with purple tape. Coloured pins mark the locations of radar sites. In a small box above, 鈥淪even International Choke Points鈥� are represented on a miniature world map. There鈥檚 a distinctly home-made feel here, offsetting the highly professional photography. Add some redacted documents and from units such as (motto: 鈥淩esistance is Futile鈥�), and that home comes across as belonging to a very tense paranoiac.

Code words

There鈥檚 more to this show than doom and gloom about the state; Paglen can be puckish as well, with a looping list of alphabetised Code Names of the Surveillance State culled from and projects. Among the more than 4000 entries are 鈥淏leak Inquiry鈥�, 鈥淏leeding Bunny鈥�, 鈥淕ray Wacker鈥�, 鈥淕ordian Knot鈥� and 鈥淗eckled Pen鈥�. These code names are presented without context, as if to crush the viewer with the blunt force of their absurdity. A gesture to that supposedly futile resistance is Autonomy Cube, a motherboard displayed under transparent glass that operates as a Wi-Fi hotspot, protected from government surveillance with anonymisation software (see below).

Autonomy Cube, 2015 (Image: Trevor Paglen/Metro Pictures)

The most forceful piece on display 鈥� and the largest 鈥� is Eighty Nine Landscapes, comprised of footage that Paglen shot but did not use for Citizenfour, recent, Oscar-winning documentary on Edward Snowden. Two giant screens show complementary static shots of unnamed federal complexes, industrial parks and lonely outposts. The settings are invariably bleak: ominous blue-grey clouds impend over vacant horizons. With minimal background noise and a thrumming ambient soundtrack by Frank Kruse, Eighty Nine Landscapes is the security state as horror movie, in which all the violence takes place off-screen.

At the approaching footsteps of a security guard, patrolling yet another undisclosed location, you realise that for some, Paglen鈥檚 own filming could be construed as an act of aggression 鈥� although . Eighty Nine Landscapes sums up Paglen鈥檚 message: 鈥渢hey鈥� might be watching, but we can always stare back.

Trevor Paglen鈥檚 exhibition is at Metro Pictures gallery in New York from 10 September until 24 October 2015.

The bio-bricks used in Hy-Fi can be grown in five days (Image: Kris Graves)

A sweeping tower made from over 10,000 bio-waste bricks bound with fungal fibre has been growing in the courtyard of MoMA PS1, an offshoot of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Looking like something between a three-headed grain silo, and a , Hy-Fi is the winner of this year鈥檚 MoMA PS1 (YAP), and its organic aesthetic clashes hard with the museum鈥檚 red-brick frontage and the green-glass Citicorp building behind.

This is appropriate. As the brainchild of environmentally conscious architects , Hy-Fi is no corporate monolith or repurposed temple of high culture. Principal architect David Benjamin calls it a 鈥溾��. Grown from local agricultural waste with almost no carbon emissions, Hy-Fi is designed to be composted, save for a few beams made of reclaimed wood and steel. (A side exhibit shows the distinct stages of the bricks鈥� decomposition.) Hy-Fi isn鈥檛 meant to blend with its human surroundings, so much as with the urban ecosystem.

Hy-Fi, like all YAP final products, provides aesthetically charged shade for , and its persistent, not entirely unpleasant fungal stench will no doubt mix well with the fragrance released by intoxicated revellers. But it seems a shame to limit such innovative building techniques to summer bacchanalias. Standing in Hy-Fi鈥檚 interior shadow, where the July afternoon鈥檚 swamp-like torpor became more manageable, another function suggested itself: temporary shelter for those displaced by disaster.

Hy-Fi has been constructed to provide a pleasingly cool interior micro-climate (Image: Kris Graves)

When Hurricane Katrina struck the US eastern seaboard in 2005, large institutional structures, such as and , proved to be inadequate shelters. This highlighted a need for rapidly deployed, weather-proof housing, a theme that was explored by the 2008 MoMA show , which featured a presentation of prefabricated, modular housing units.

With its open roof, Hy-Fi might not be up to disaster protection in its current form. But its construction provides surprisingly effective relief from heat: the structure draws in cool air at the bottom and pushes hot air out the top, creating a pleasant interior micro-climate. Similar buildings could see use as a temporary triage station or a meeting-point for first responders.

The future of disaster relief may be found in such structures, says Benjamin. He emphasizes the sturdiness of the bio-brick construction, including its ability 鈥渢o withstand hurricane winds鈥�. , the sustainable bio-materials firm partnering with The Living, can grow the bricks in approximately five days from agricultural by-products such as corn stalks held together with mycelium 鈥� the vegetative matter of mushrooms. It remains to be seen whether structures descended from Hy-Fi can be erected quickly enough to be useful, with minimal engineering input.

Right now, Hy-Fi is an environmentally friendly chill-tent for urban partygoers. But it is possible, as you wander through this loamy, shady space, to catch the scent of a much bigger opportunity.

Warm Up runs at MoMA PS1 in New York until 6 September 2014