Behind the Urban Interface

“She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her.”

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“Our networked society is increasingly dominated by what Lewis Mumford called the unseen world of cables, wires, connections, codes, agreements, and capital. Today more than ever, the role of this invisible city in determining the structure of the urban area is vast. Visible form is merely an irruption of other forces, a graphic user interface for a more powerful command line below.”

Kazys Varnelis

HardwareSoftware

“Where we’re going, we need roads.”