Invisible Cities: Alex Monteith -PS

It *is* a good piece though!
michael
— Geert Dekkers <[email protected]> wrote:

> NOt having read "Invisible Cities" leaves me myself
> vulnerable to
> critique of course – but I do know some of
> Calvino's work. But may I
> dare to question why searching altavista for images
> based on 2000
> common nouns could give me results that are
> something like " the shape
> the book would have taken if the emperor had been
> more techno-savvy" ??
>
> I wanted to end this with a Gertrude Stein quote,
> which I thought was
> "a word has no meaning a sentence has" – but then I
> realized I was
> unsure if I'd quoted correctly – was it perhaps "a
> sentence has no
> meaning a paragraph has"?? I thus spent a good part
> of a half hour
> trying to find the quote – and realized that while
> it is easy to find
> something "on the internet", it's vicously difficult
> to find something
> SPECIFIC.
>
> So – back to the piece above – it's obviously a
> useful script. But as
> a work of art – it's just too easy.
>
> Cheers
> Geert
> (http://nznl.com)
>
>
>
> On 19-okt-04, at 4:22, Luke Duncalfe wrote:
>
> > Retrieving pages of images from the AltaVista
> search engine, Invisible
> > Cities by Alex Monteith sets in movement an
> infinite zootrope of
> > places, people and random information sourced from
> the distant
> > cityscapes of the Internet.
> >
> > Scripted by Sean Kerr, the work reveals images
> based on 2,000 nouns
> > from Italo Calvino's influential novel of the same
> name. In Calvino's
> > Invisible Cities the qualities of fictional
> cityscapes are relayed
> > back home, search engine-like, to the awaiting
> emperor Khan. In
> > Monteith's work, the landscapes of cities are
> replaced by the
> > landscapes of information media: the shape the
> book would have taken
> > if the emperor had been more techno-savvy.
> >
> > The work is a conceptual play between the
> retrieval of images, both
> > textual and graphic, and of language (AltaVista
> means "a view from
> > above"). It is every bit as sharp and quirky as is
> the novel script it
> > uses as its source; a response to the text and to
> the invisible
> > architecture of the Internet in equal measure.
> >
> > At Window: http://www.window.auckland.ac.nz/
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> -> questions: [email protected]
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