Invisible cities,
invisiblecities
Visualized
In 1972, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities was first published. The novel sits at the border of prose and poetry that details the conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo as the latter describes all the distant cities in the Mongol Empire to the former. As the (non-linear) novel proceeds, Kublai Khan expresses frustration with Marco Polo because the cities begin to seem the same in his imagination.
In 2022, David Holz and team developed Midjourney, an AI that takes inputs from the user and generates beautiful images. Users can make small adjustments and iterate on generated images to make them better match the user's imagination.
This last year, I set out to try and create images of the cities in Invisible Cities by entering the descriptions Marco Polo provides – sometimes in whole, sometimes in part – and seeing what Midjourney built based on those prompts. I found myself in a similar predicament as that of Marco Polo - someone who had lived in the real world, who had seen cities both real and imagined, and who was trying to convey what those cities looked like to someone else's imagination in a way that was satisfactory to both of us. In time, I’d like to do a “photo” collage for every “city” in the book.
Additional reading on the topic:
“Spatial computing: What designers can learn from Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities”
{Are you interested in helping with the project? Reach out to me: jimmy AT jimmymarks DOT com}
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Diomira
Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theater, a golden cock that crows each morning upon on a tower...
Isidora
“
Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made...
”
Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by
Dorothea
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There are two ways of describing the city of Dorothea: you can say that four aluminum towers rise from its walls flanking seven gates with spring-operated drawbridges that span the moat whose water feeds four green canals which cross the city, dividing it into nine quarters, each with three hundred houses and seven hundred chimneys...
Zaira
“
In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to
describe Zaira, city of high bastions...
”
As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira's past.
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand...
Anastasia
“
At the end of three days, moving southward, you
come upon Anastasia, a city with concentric canals
watering it and kites flying over it. I should now list
the wares that can profitably be bought here: agate, onyx, chrysoprase, and other varieties of chalcedony; I should praise the flesh of the golden pheasant cooked here over fires of seasoned cherry wood and sprinkled with much sweet marjoram...
Tamara
“
Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara.
You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer's house; a tankard, the tavern; halberds, the barracks; scales, the grocer's. Statues and shields depict lions, dolphins, towers, stars: a sign that something—who knows what?—has as its sign a lion or a dolphin or a tower or a star.
”
However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it...
zora
“
Beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges rises
Zora, a city that no one, having seen it, can forget...
”
The man who knows by heart how Zora is made, if he is unable to sleep at night, can imagine he is walking along the streets and he remembers the order by which the copper clock follows the barber's striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets,
the astronomer's glass tower, the melon vendor's kiosk, the statue of the hermit and the lion...Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world's most learned men are those who have memorized Zora.
Despina
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Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea.
When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red wind- socks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails...
zirma
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Travelers return from the city of Zirma with distinct memories: a blind black man shouting in the crowd, a lunatic teetering on a skyscraper's cornice, a girl walking with a puma on a leash. Actually many of the blind men who tap their canes on Zirma's cobblestones are black; in every skyscraper there is some- one going mad; all lunatics spend hours on cornices; there is no puma that some girl does not raise, as a whim. The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind...
Made on mmm