Invisible Cities

  • We at Diskotopia are incredibly excited to be presenting the new album Invisible Cities from Memotone, the principal alias for Bristol-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer William Yates.
  • Invisible Cities is a social enterprise that trains people who have experienced homelessness to become walking tour guides of their own city. We offer alternative tours to locals and tourists.

The challenge is working with excerpts from a text that lends itself particularly well to this task, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In short, Invisible Cities is the fantastic description of 55 mythical cities, each with a character and personality of its own.

Cities & The Dead What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roofs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds. INVISIBLE CITIES - An Opera for Headphones - by Christopher Cerrone. Based on the novel by Italo Calvino.

The task is to choose 5 cities from the selection provided and create a book that pushes the boundaries of the traditional book format.
The goal of the project is to present the text in a way that makes for an unusual, surprising, and rewarding experience for the reader. Think about how it can innovate on the physical structure and format of the book to add an interesting dimension to the text.

Cities & Eyes

Valdrada

PdfEpubInvisible

The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake, with houses all verandas one above the other, and high streets whose railed parapets look out over the water. Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror, and the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the flutings and juttings of the facades that rise above the lake, but also the rooms' interiors with ceilings and floors, the perspective of the halls, the mirrors of the wardrobes.

Trading Cities

Eutropia

Eutropia is not one, but all these cities together; only one is inhabited at a time, the others are empty; and this process is carried out in rotation. Now I shall tell you how. On the day when Eutropia’s inhabitants feel the grip of weariness and no one can bear any longer his job, his relatives, his house and his life, debts, the people he must greet or who greet him, then the whole citizenry decides to move to the next city, which is there waiting for them, empty and good as new; there each will take up a new job, a different wife, will see another landscape on opening his window, and will spend his time with different pastimes, friends, gossip.

Thin Cities

Invisible Cities Pdf

Isaura

Isaura is a city built upon deep vertical wells. And so far as the wells reach, the city exists. Beyond the reach of its underwater lake, the city ceases to be, it’s visible border mirroring the unseen borders of the lake below. Polo describes two religions growing up as a result of this geography. One group of people worships the god of the deep reservoir, the unseen lake and source of life to the area. The other worships all the methods produced to ensure that water moves upwards to the city.

Cities & The Sky

Invisible Cities Quotes

Andria

Andria was built so artfully that its every street follows a planet's orbit, and the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars: Antares, Alpheratz, Capricorn, the Cepheids. The city's calendar is so regulated that jobs and offices and ceremonies are arranged in a map corresponding to the firmament on that date: and thus the days on earth and the nights in the sky reflect each other.

Cities & Desire

Fedora

In the center of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms the city could have taken if, it had not for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today.