webwork 3
Paris ville invisible,
by Bruno LATOUR [text], Émilie HERMANT [photos] and Patricia REED [web design] (France), 2004
"sociology may be construed as the science of associations and not only as the science of the social."
Bruno Latour1
What the authors show us here is not Paris "City of Light," le tout Paris, but Paris the city of networks, the channels of signifiers: from sign to sign, through word and sign and billboard and referent and object, maps and models, both electronic and cardboard, "standing for," "as if," "in place of," all of which nonetheless enables the City to circulate, to function, to breathe, to live… Virtual Paris - not in the sense of being unreal, but of the Paris of possibilities, of what makes Paris possible, networking superstructure and infrastructure together, organization and planning with economic forecasts, past and present with the future.
From the outset we are presented with the City cut and edited into four general levels: "TRAVERSING," "PROPORTIONING," "DISTRIBUTING," and "ALLOWING." A click of the mouse opens each of these options onto a particular trajectory through Paris. A left-hand panel traces the journey through little squares (53 of them throughout the four levels), each linked to a plan or view that frames and re-frames one aspect or another of the City, so as to propose simultaneously partial and multiple modes of illustration and exploration. Visitors may pick their way through these plans, either carefully following a path, as would a meticulous stroller, or dawdling haphazardly: various images then appear on the right, sometimes in panoramic movement (with a bird's-eye view of the City), sometimes in reduced format; one may use the mouse to enlarge images, to make them scroll or move. Often, the images are distributed in the frame space as on a road map or tactical plan, connected to each other by lines suggesting a formal arrangement - and thus elucidation - of situations, relations, associations, intrigues, or interdependencies. The latter may be partial or fragile, eminently (though not absolutely) changeable and malleable; they are functional, however, for they serve to connect both the local and the global, the particular and the general, the detail and the whole, things and signs of signs, along with their agents and actors; what they serve to create are places and modes of passage, exchange, organization, transmission, memory. These places and these modes together build the City, in layers or in sections, by neighbourhood or by network.
Also, fragments of Bruno Latour's text are displayed bellow the images of each view, like an accompaniment or commentary (a click unfolds the text in full). What does this text tell us? It tells us of various practical aspects City operations - car traffic, monument upkeep, etc. -, it updates us on facts and statistics, it recounts anecdotes and little stories that often seem like parables. It speaks to us of the invisible City.
Not in the sense of an intangible, unconscious, evanescent, or ghostly city, but as understood by Italo Calvino in his work of the same name, that is, "a catalogue of emblems,"2 allowing us to see, read and feel the City, in other words, to imagine it, and thus to make it live.
The Web appears to be particularly well-suited for this operatic exploration of the City3, the authors having given us a multimedia and multidimensional document that explores and informs, that examines the City and the idea of the City; in short, a rich and successful work.
Notes
1 : Bruno Latour, Introduction to Reassembling the Social - An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, to be published at Oxford University Press.
2 : Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1974 [Le città invisibili, 1972].
3 : One should mention that Latour's work had already been published, six years earlier, in "traditional" book form; the work is now presented on the web with the following subtitle: "a sociological web opera".
Anne-Marie Boisvert
(Translated from French by Ron Ross)
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