webwork 4
The Central City,
by STANZA (United Kingdom), 1997-2004
"My artistic intervention tries to look at fragments of our experience of cities, that make up the whole city. The Central City is a place which appears out of control, but which we try to control through design. The city as grids, and repetition, can appear sublime or it can confuse and appear prison like. Giant cities paint a gloomy picture, of mass urban sprawl; the megalopolis is spreading upwards and everywhere to house a population of which 70 - 80% now lives in cites worldwide.
These online works represent spaces, they are idealised spaces. I don't see The Central City, as a simulation. In fact, I am not aiming or particularly interested in simulation. I view the final evolution of the project as a experience, an online internet experience, which can be viewed inside the white cube of the box which is a computer. The framework, the grid, that contains this work is the computer and the internet. Images of maps redrawing and reprocessing themselves. This allows the city a perpetual evolution, no single similar path need be followed."
Stanza1
A web within the Web, a network within the network, the on-line oeuvre The Central City is labyrinthine and tentacular, as illustrated, with a good deal of humour, by the proliferation of organic, hive-like forms, part animal, part plant, that begin their voracious growth as soon as we enter the site, then gradually and wholly take over the layout we first got a glimpse of.
Nevertheless, before the tentacles cover everything, visitors still have time - especially if they think of pausing the Shockwave animation - to make out a central circle from which cables or roads of some kind lead out to connect to peripheral loci - central city, sonicity, soundcities, photocity, soundscraper, inner city, soundmaps, biocity, ccityv, …
Each of the latter constitutes a work within the work, a city within the city, and visitors have full leisure to explore each of them, make discoveries, get lost, and double back, over and over again. Thus, the work within the work that is itself entitled "The Central City" includes no less than thirty subsections: universa, constructor, videotron, megalopotron, univercity, smallworlds, textourama, elevator, jukebox, sounder, maputor, proser, city central, citoxity, fostexity, textus, sounder, randomizer, cubix, matrixity, advercity, fibrinet, advercity, fibrinet, envirus, germix, …"Each has multi soundtracks and multiple choices of pictures, using generative audio and image environments built into 3 d spaces and user controlled 3 d areas."2 In all, more than 200 little films.
Thus, in exploring the nooks and crannies of Central City's subsections, and those of other cities-within-cities - sonicity, biocity, etc. -, one finds collages of images - often re-touched or processed photos or films of "real" cities, like London, Barcelona, etc., and computer-generated abstract drawings - and sounds - sampled in cities or electronically created -, along with pictures of futuristic buildings and improbable skyscrapers. One thinks of the city plans one typically finds in science-fiction. Yet these ones often become philosophical ruminations on the current state of cities, on what they are, what they can be, at the most abstract yet most important level, that is, beyond their status as concrete housing projects, on the relationships and interactions between their settings and their residents.
As its author emphasizes, The Central City is not a "simulation" or representation, it is an "experience"3, as much for its creator - who has been "in progress" with this work since 1997 - as for the visitor, whom the many interactive elements of the work draw into participating in the creative process.
Centralization on the one hand, rampant proliferation on the other: doesn't that sum up in a single image the modus vivendi and modus operandi of today's megalopolis, and all the more so of the Web, the centre of which - like God - is everywhere, its circumference nowhere?
Notes
1 : Stanza, Continuing the search for the "soul of the city". 
2 : Stanza, www.thecentralcity.co.uk/index.html and www.thecentralcity.co.uk/info/indexfull.html
3 : Stanza, www.thecentralcity.co.uk/info/indexfull.html
Anne-Marie Boisvert
(Translated from French by Ron Ross)
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