I. Invisible Cities (1976)

     A. What's left?

          1. Awareness of form; opposes reader identification

          2. The beauty of language

          3. Thinking through literature

     B. Observations on the empire of signs

          1. “Formless ruin” or “tracery of a pattern”? (5-6, 59-60)

          2. Deadlock and reversal (8, 22, 38-39, 82)

          3. Signs that conceal, signs that lie (14, 47, 62)

          4. Chaotic list (but with irony) (15-16, 114)

          5. Perspective (9, 17-18, 19, 131)

          6. Ars combinatoria (43, 60, 69, 106, 108, 121)

     C. An elaborately conceived formal structure

          1. Too elaborate?

          2. Birth and exhaustion

          3. Infinitely extendible

          4. Mania for ordering, categorization, abstraction

          5. Opposed by the individual city, unique

          6. Opposed by cities as objects of desire

     D. What does it all mean?

          1. “Unlivable cities” & transforming modern urban life

          2. The dialectic method

          3. A demonstration of the combinatory arts

          4. The empire as a cognitive map

 

II. Invisible Cities and contemporary art

 

• photography: Salvatore Pipia, Jody Zellen

• children's drawings: Italo Calvino Elementary

• edible cakes: Parilla and Mariarosa

• sand castles: Sergi Ramírez

• painting: Pedro Cano, Caterina Potokar

• music: George de Decker, Claudio Angeleri, Alwynne Pritchard, Daan Manneke, Swell and Robinson, The Invisible Cities, Gregory Cowley et al., Michael McNabb

• theater: Riccardo Rombi, Ali Akbar Alizad

• architecture: Gianni Ranaulo, Tressants

• literature: Alan Lightman

• various art: Colleen Brannigan, Rodcorp, Neil Smith and Helen Ganly, Ahree Lee

• computer animation: Julio Soto

• videodance: John Crawford

• hip-hop theater: various

• multimedia/installation/performance: The Builders Association

• Viewmaster discs: Vladimir (Franz Kafka discs are available, too!)

And Polo said: “The hell of the living is not something that will be. If there is one, it is what is already here, the hell we live in every day, that we make by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the hell, and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, are not hell, then make them endure, give them space.”