Invisible Cities

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places
–Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Cities are not merely buildings, objects, and things, but also lives, and even something as abstract as desires. To think cities as an assemblage of desires is one way to enter into the unknown, the poetic, the different, and invisible materiality of the cultural life of the city. This is why I am calling this blog Invisible SF. The point, of course, is not merely to make the city “known,” —the same way, for example, that Ishi was rendered knowable and made visible, and thereby turned into an object of Modern knowledge— but to enter into that which remains unknown and unknowable: the life of the city.