Invisible Cities: 
Alteration through Misunderstanding

Abhay Narasimhan + Emil Sarkisyan

“Let this book be whatever you need it to be.” 

The Experiment: Alteration through Misunderstanding 

Materials Required: Italo Calvino - “Invisible Cities”, Brains, Intuition, and a friend.

Procedure: Each user selects a ‘City’ from the book, and documents its imprint as a collection of words. The user then performs a transformation of this semi-analytical form to produce a single page representation. (Analog/Digital) The pair of users then exchange these reproductions of ideas, not having known the city selected by the other. One annotates and understands from these reproductions - playing a game of Chinese whispers (or in this case, Mongolian) - and registers these as a distinct collection of words. Secondly, one modifies - to a degree felt worthy - the other’s reproduction and returns it to the originator. 

The Great Khan’s mind set out on its own, and after dismantling the city piece by piece, he reconstructed it in other ways, substituting components, shifting them, inverting them.  -  (Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino)

The originator then produces an ultimate version. 

This would result in a series of “misunderstood” drawings, drawings that make visible the invisible city. It is Marco Polo that describes an imaginary figment but only does the city actualize in the mind of the Khan, and only then, can Marco Polo perceive his described city. 

But what enhanced for Kublai every event or piece of news reported by his inarticulate informer was the space around it, a void not filled with words. The descriptions of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.

Brief: The users play the role of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan simultaneously, producing an interpretation of the other’s perception. The mind altered by the subjectivity of representation.