Paris: Invisible City

Paris: Ville Invisible Online

Paris: Invisible City | Paris: Ville Invisible existed firstly as a french publication written by Bruno Latour with photography from Emilie Hermant and designed by Susanna Shannon. The book presents us with a new way to approach sociology, namely through a series of of ‘dis-locals’, or small elements of the functioning of the city that are not apparent when using conventional sociological approaches. The book takes us through a simultaneous photographic and written exploration of Paris, and leaves with a question as to what holds this collection of dis-locals in tact – what is the binding Plasma?

The web version of the book which exist for both English and French speaking audiences uses the chapters in the book as differentiators of sorts, which allows for varying interface possibilities.

The second section [proportioning] refers to a lateral scaling, where every image appear the same size, even though the actual scale of the images is greatly varied. Through the lateral movement of the images as they enter the screen, when gain a short glimpse at the relations between the images, before one fills the entire screen, thereby showing only a fragment of the sequence. Movement is lateral.

The third sequence [dimensioning] takes us through an archive where there is the movement of leafing through old files and documents. In this leafing through one image comes abruptly after the other and dominates our view – hiding the other either recently passed or near to come. When transferring this sensibility into a web platform the act of clicking was too certain a gesture to activate the interface, so the user simply runs their mouse across the tabs of the ‘files’ in order to swap positions and have a new image dominate over the other. Movement is leafing through, or for a screen environment, z-depth swapping.

The last sequence takes us back to a panorama, an updated version. in this sequence the question is posed as to what the connective plasma is in this configuration of ‘dis-locals’ we just experienced. Since this space is undefined, the user is free in this section to modify the rhizome structure which binds the images together. Upon activating a node of the structure, the background image switches to correspond to the selected node. Movement: sprawling and variable.