Christian earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Parsons School of Design in New York, and attended the Yale University School of Art in New Haven, where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 2004. From an interest in working with data he has adopted a parametric, process-oriented approach in his work, which is concerned with evidence, disclosure and the materiality of information. It is ultimately a parallel city of intersections, discovery, and memory, and a medium for experiencing the physical environment anew.Ĭhristian Marc Schmidt is a German/American designer and media artist, educated in Europe and the United States and currently residing in New York. The interplay between the aggregate and the real-time recreates the kind of dynamics present within the physical world, where the city is both a vessel for and a product of human activity. In doing so, the piece creates a parallel experience to the physical urban environment. Invisible Cities maps information from one realm - online social networks-to another: an immersive, three dimensional space. These pathways create dense meta-networks of meaning, blanketing the terrain and connecting disparate areas of the city. Oxford: Blackwell.In the piece, nodes are connected by narrative threads, based on themes emerging from the overlaid information. Jacopo de Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views and Moralised Geography Before the Year 1500. The Printed Plans and Panoramic View of Venice (1486–1797). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State. The Venice Variations: Tracing the Architectural Imagination. Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe’s Discovery of the East. Space is the Machine: A Configurational Theory for Architecture. Building Renaissance Venice: Patrons, Architects and Builders, c. Journal of Historical Geography 8 (2): 145–169. The Myth and the Stones of Venice: An Historical Geography of a Symbolic Landscape. Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art 40: 177–182. Harvard Architectural Review 4 (Spring): 6–7. Modern Fiction Studies 34 (4): 559–573.Ĭalvino, Italo. Italo Calvino: The Place of the Emperor in Invisible Cities. Taking inspiration from Polo’s travels in Il Milione and other canonical texts, Calvino found in Venice a combinatorial universe of artisanal craftsmanship, like an ancient artifact of epic or myth, where the theme of multiplicity develops its variations.īreiner, Laurence A. It argues that from islands and building blocks to official histories and fables, Venice for Calvino is not simply an archetype for the literary imagination, but also a multitude of recombinant elements, capturing its spatial, social, and mythical legacy. Since most cities are built as spatial networks, what role does actually Venice play in this fiction? Is Venice a loose metaphor for Calvino’s multi-faceted text, or does it bear wider significance for his literature? Through an analysis of Venice’s history and geography and an analysis of Calvino’s fiction, this chapter describes Venice and Invisible Cities as systems that resemble a probabilistic algorithm, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of spatial and narrative variations. Calvino described Invisible Cities as a “space” into which the reader must enter, roam around, and even lose direction, implying that the open-ended structure of the book exemplifies a city’s spatial network. Kublai soon realizes that every time Polo describes a city he says something about Venice and that all cities are mere variations, achieved by an interchange of elements from Polo’s native city. In Invisible Cities, the theme of variations takes the form of 55 micro-texts and 18 dialogues grouped into an overarching text, a prose poem for cities that recounts how Marco Polo, the Venetian traveler, describes to Kublai Khan, the emperor of Mongolia, the cities of the Great Khan’s empire. From cosmic particles to gold-leaf tarot cards, Calvino’s fictions are variations on a theme, confronting literature, direct observation of the world, and knowledge as kaleidoscopic games of narrative possibility.
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