The city is an operator of codes, an operator of decodings. It doesn't exist except as a function of a circulation and circuits. It is an exceptional point on the circuits which create it and which it creates. It is defined by entrances and exits. Something must enter and exit. Passages of flows, creating a network, imposing a frequency.
- Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus
- Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus
Flesh of the city: The city as a secretion and envelope of the social body.
As many metaphors of the city, like circulation, respiration, communication, suggest to us, we can think of the city as an organic being in perpetual interaction with its different organs, like the electrical system, its nets of circulation and evacuation, and also its nervous webs of surveillance, public transportation, highways, roads, streets, etc. According to Henri Laborit, "The human group functions to live and maintain the structure of the community. The cellular group`s finality is to maintain its organization, to maintain a complex structure in a less complex environment. The city is a means of realizing this finality. The city... represents one of the means used by the social organism for controlling and maintaining its structure."
The non-linear progression through these environments allows the viewer to weave through its cross sections, images of the textures lining it, streams of energy animating it with elements entering and exiting, and finally how it is alive.
