Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino has written a masterpiece that is poetry, yet profound philosophy at the same time. This work demands a deep reading; you can miss it if you don't dig in to its surprises and lean, but etched language.

Calvino link

"A book (I believe) is something that has a beginning and an end (even if it isn't a novel in the strict sense), it is a space where the reader must come in, walk around, even get lost, but in a certain moment find an exit, or several exits…
This is a book that is made as a polyadr, and the conclusions that it has are somewhat visible everywhere along all its edges."--I.C.

Digital Mortuary

As burial gives way to cremation
the question becomes
what remains of person
and where does one reside in the temporal realm?
Why not store pictures,documents and motion clips of the deceased in beautiul place fitted out with a good screen?

Language is THE medium

For us humans, language mediates the world. If so, why not caption it all? GPS linked to the WWW makes it feasible to tie unlimited text to specific places. Go to a cultural site, open the text referenced to that space, read it-- add your own annotations--make new links. Thus the space/object can be extended in time. (This was posted in February; Google has sonce introduced several aplications that bring it close, of not to, reality).

An entirely different way of approaching this is to reflect on urban life without text--no street signs, no text advertising, no "restroom", no license plates on the cars, no elevator button numbers, no bus, subway or emergency pull handle directions. Add to the list of banned items the quasi-texts of handicapped symbols, corporate logos and direction arrows. Maybe strolling through midtown Manhattan, you'd be able to decode the architecture in some places (Public Library), but for the mosrt part, urbanity is text.