Petra Gemeinboeck

The electro-magnetic flows of information and mobile technologies pervading our everyday life are often said to be spinning such “filigree cities.” Cities, whose “opaque and fictitious thickness” can only be accessed if we co-inhabit these invisible spaces. And yet, this city is only one of the multiple cities, invisible and visible, we inhabit in our everyday life. The imbrication of these multiple spaces shapes a thickness that might appear opaque – invisible– and yet that is certainly not fictitious. This experiment explores the negotiation of multiple urban geographies by looking at one such invisible city, twined by the spatial and temporal pattern of diverse everyday practices, through the “fictitious thickness” of another, the virtual spaces spanned by mobile technologies. It imagines the city as a playground, where Calvino’s Invisible Cities [2] meet Debord’s ‘Naked City. [3] Mapping this playground we develop alternative modes of reading and forms of representation that produce spaces in-between, hybrid spaces, from which other relations, yet unknown, can emerge.