One Text, Many Stories—a Nightmare of Change in which Time is Inscribed in Space—or How a Text Became a Story.

One Text, Many Stories is an exploration of reading, and of how the visual context and process of reading influences interpretation. One Text envisions a journey through a city that triggers a series of recollections about the changing nature of the urban environment and leads to a reverie about sense of place filtered through memory.

An original text composed of nine short passages, describes an urban space reconstituted in memory, and is interspersed with short extracts from Michael de Certeau's ”The Practice of Everyday Life“ and ”The Production of Space“ by Henri Lefebre. Taken together, the passages are a construction of 'the city’ as a fluid mental map of elements that are shuffled and rearranged. The texts explore the changing texture of urban space, perceptions of movement through the urban environment and the semiotics of space. Inspired by the CSS Zen Garden use of CSS to separate structure and appearance, each page re-displays and reconfigures the primary text. Through this alteration, the text undergoes shifts in meaning and narrative arc.