InVisible Cities

config.style.page.color: "#6a6362 on #f9f2eb" config.style.page.link.color: "#4e4121" config.style.page.link.lineColor: "#154c79" config.style.page.link.active.color: "#154c79" -- <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54611338858/in/dateposted-public/" title="Getty_1_Public Domain_(In)Visible Cities Cover."><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54611338858_2e5fd6915b_b.jpg" width="1023" height="1024" alt="Getty_1_Public Domain_(In)Visible Cities Cover."/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ *(In)Visible Cities* A Recovery A ReMemoration A ReMediation [[Begin.]]

Of course, all knew the colour of shame. Felt hot, sudden and painful, clenching lungs and sternum. The tight grip of diaphragm and loss of breath. What is the colour of culpability? Do you know?” She ask each and each sage man and wise woman shook and bowed their heads. Of course each knew the colour of personal shame, its many shades, its contours. They had felt it. Studied it. For how could you be wise if you had not examined the degrees and distinctions of human emotion? From prevarication, to dissembling, repudiation, and self-deception. The gambits to defer [[moral culpability]].

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54603869306/in/dateposted-public/" title="Getty 5 Public Domain"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54603869306_80eb9eaf43.jpg" width="500" height="363" alt="Getty 5 Public Domain"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> To answer to the Ancient's question, they realized that the colour of shame could only be answered by understanding the magnitude of what had been destroyed. Not just in the moment of erasure. The totality of a city remembered and recorded in voices over eons, names long forgotten. The magnitude of the task. To recover the pixelated fragments, traces, records, voices, portraits, ephemera of each of the disappeared, the filaments and echoes of relations over time, transmitted in the daily hand touching hand touching tree touching sail touching child touching kite touching faith touching stone touching tree Where to [[begin?]]

Understanding the enormity of her request, the Ancient decreed that all the maps ever drawn, ever sung, ever written of this razed city must be found. This was where they should start. When the map was complete she wished to see and understand all the records in the archive, individually and as a whole. Each record in its place. Each place a layered, interconnected tale, told through fragments. Many legible in the one. When the task was complete she wished to see and understand the records in the archive, individually and as a whole. And, she affirmed, she trusted that her sage men and wise women would render legible the relationships between the whole, footpaths and bridges, nodes and edges, dreams and memories. This she [[decreed.]].

The next morning a young scholar aloft to adjust a shading screen, paused, and looking below, gasped and hurried down the ladder. Elder, they called. I have seen it. Instead of visualizing in extent, we must layer so that time is revealed. We must layer to look back into the furthest times that have been recorded. The elder considered. “How would you proceed?” The young scholar excitedly described the finest silks created in their city. A silk so fine it had to be dyed to be visible. Famous for its strength and malleability in colour and texture. It was possible to paint the simulacra of a full suit of armour which then appeared as tensile steel and bronze. To wear this into battle. A trompe l’oeil kept secret to this moment as this strategem had kept the city safe over centuries. If we trace all the maps on individual panels and we consider the change of streets and walls, harbours and orchards over time, and align these, we can create a transparent window into and through time. The city in maps will [[live again]].

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54587214276/in/dateposted-public/" title="Getty 4_Public Domain"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54587214276_5a88eff2db_w.jpg" width="400" height="320" alt="Getty 4_Public Domain"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> The Elder considered. This I can see. How though, will the Ancient be able to comprehend the individual traces, the rendering of a home, a business, a bridge, a fountain, if she so wishes? The young scholar gazed across the extent of documents and then looked up. They raised their hand, gesturing to the shading screens. We can use light. We can illuminate. We can cast in shadow if beams can be directed between the layers and from above. An intricate unfolding and reconfiguration of relations through light and shade. The elder nodded. [[Proceed]]

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54587533750/in/dateposted-public/" title="Book Cover Front"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54587533750_d299e077e1.jpg" width="469" height="500" alt="Book Cover Front"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> *The City by the Sea* Miraculously preserved and found within the rubbled mix of concrete shards, rebar, and the remnants of an apartment in a building that once looked out to the shining sea. Undated remembrances of the everyday that used to be. Now only discoverable in digital, video and photographic traces as the keepers of memory disappear. Each photo, each book, each post, the remnants of time recaptured. [[Open|open]].

*The City by the Sea* Miraculously preserved and found within the rubbled mix of concrete shards, rebar, and the remnants of an apartment in a building that once looked out to the shining sea. Undated remembrances of the everyday that used to be. Now only discoverable in digital, video and photographic traces as the keepers of memory disappear *Alternate images appear on pages with the* <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54605122498/in/dateposted-public/" title="Stawberry"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54605122498_c94b4fb12a_t.jpg" width="85" height="100" alt="Stawberry"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> Download the Halo App in iOS or Android Play. Scan the QR code to access @FurAllCatkind AR media. <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54612065822/in/album-72177720326845039" title="(In)Visible Cities Halo QR Code"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54612065822_3c2125d273_m.jpg" width="240" height="240" alt="(In)Visible Cities Halo QR Code"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

A further five years passed. A spring day’s sun rose as the last silk scrim was lowered into place. The hall’s ceiling had been raised to accommodate the layers, from the earliest diaphanous map to the most recent. A strata of movement in time. At the apex of the hall, the Ancient directed the playing of light and shadow, such that each and any map could be revealed or concealed in relation to the others. She nodded. This assemblage is a wonder. Now that you have rendered the Invisible City visible, find the a way to assemble the pixelated fragments, traces, records, voices, portraits, ephemera of each of the lost, the filaments and echoes of relations over time, in relation to this four-dimensional map. Bring back the traces transmitted in the daily hand touching hand touching tree touching sail touching child touching kite touching faith touching stone touching [[tree]] .

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54603363262/in/album-72177720326845039" title="Catkind"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54603363262_d19e60bfcc.jpg" width="355" height="500" alt="Catkind"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> [[Everyday Life|Everyday]]. *For All Catkind.* <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54605122498/in/dateposted-public/" title="Stawberry"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54605122498_c94b4fb12a_t.jpg" width="85" height="100" alt="Stawberry"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54604454928/in/album-72177720326845039" title="Bakery"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54604454928_eaf1ed8d74.jpg" width="355" height="500" alt="Bakery"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> The Bakery. Beloved by all. Especially [[the children]]. <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54605122498/in/dateposted-public/" title="Stawberry"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54605122498_c94b4fb12a_t.jpg" width="85" height="100" alt="Stawberry"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54604455798/in/album-72177720326845039" title="White Kite"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54604455798_e2699ea977.jpg" width="353" height="500" alt="White Kite"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> To spend the day with those you love [[best]]. Flying white kites to catch a cloud. <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54605122498/in/dateposted-public/" title="Stawberry"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54605122498_c94b4fb12a_t.jpg" width="85" height="100" alt="Stawberry"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54604241891/in/album-72177720326845039" title="Orchards"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54604241891_125ce3e7da.jpg" width="354" height="500" alt="Orchards"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> Ancient orchards, kin of another [[kind]]. <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54605122498/in/dateposted-public/" title="Stawberry"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54605122498_c94b4fb12a_t.jpg" width="85" height="100" alt="Stawberry"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54604242556/in/album-72177720326845039" title="Strawberry"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54604242556_7048bb8b76.jpg" width="354" height="500" alt="Strawberry"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> [[Strawberries]]. Red red red under a blue sky. <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54605122498/in/dateposted-public/" title="Stawberry"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54605122498_c94b4fb12a_t.jpg" width="85" height="100" alt="Stawberry"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54603372512/in/album-72177720326845039" title="Howl"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54603372512_5354773389.jpg" width="353" height="500" alt="Howl"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> Papa reads a favorite, [[HOWL]], a celebration in the forest of noise. <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54605122498/in/dateposted-public/" title="Stawberry"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54605122498_c94b4fb12a_t.jpg" width="85" height="100" alt="Stawberry"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54604248596/in/album-72177720326845039" title="Campfire"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54604248596_3c8ba7579b.jpg" width="354" height="500" alt="Campfire"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> "Daddy, if we are camping, where are the [[marshmallows]]? Stars glint above and below. <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54605122498/in/dateposted-public/" title="Stawberry"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54605122498_c94b4fb12a_t.jpg" width="85" height="100" alt="Stawberry"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54604249361/in/album-72177720326845039" title="Graduation"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54604249361_60edf10639.jpg" width="354" height="500" alt="Graduation"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> A day of hearts bursting with pride. [[Graduation]]. The future beckons. Hind. 29 January 2024 - 10 February 2024. <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54605122498/in/dateposted-public/" title="Stawberry"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54605122498_c94b4fb12a_t.jpg" width="85" height="100" alt="Stawberry"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54604555570/in/album-72177720326845039/" title="Light in Dark"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54604555570_9c18709825.jpg" width="354" height="500" alt="Light in Dark"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> The promise of parents. I will always be there with you in [[Darkness|Grief]] <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54605122498/in/dateposted-public/" title="Stawberry"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54605122498_c94b4fb12a_t.jpg" width="85" height="100" alt="Stawberry"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54604556505/in/dateposted-public/" title="Grief"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54604556505_f550582bea.jpg" width="355" height="500" alt="Grief"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> To love and to carry. To carry and hold. To hold and hear. To hear and reach. To reach and to [[grieve]]. <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54605122498/in/dateposted-public/" title="Stawberry"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54605122498_c94b4fb12a_t.jpg" width="85" height="100" alt="Stawberry"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54605071689/in/dateposted-public/" title="Book 2"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54605071689_5c4e241157.jpg" width="469" height="500" alt="Book 2"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> [[The Sea Remains.|remember]]

For All CatKind (@FurAllCatkind on Instagram) began early Feb. 2024 as a response to the bifurcation of (social) media coverage of world crises. The initial series of Midjourney images envisioned life in an idyllic seaside town, cats going about in their daily lives. On the beach flying kites, picnicking, riding in donkey carts, visiting shops, orchards, fields, and market day. Instagram’s uncritical juxtaposition of cats and catastrophes recalled differently the dislocative juxtaposition of “here” and “there” in Paula Levine’s 2004 seminal geolocative work, *Shadows from Another Place: San Francisco<->Baghdad*, which transposed an interactive and updating GPS map layer of the US bombings of Baghdad onto a map of San Francisco. The dissonance of the images, of my positionality and privilege, witnessing, safe, the razing of cities through distancing screens. The scale of erasure underway led me to start a second record, twinned yet increasingly divergent. How many of us have never spoken of what we have witnessed? I never did, and I don’t now. I knew that I would forget. I would forget the details, the moments, the words, the faces, the living, the dead, over time, in the continuous stream of new videos, images, and audio. The woman who… The child who… The witness who… The building where… The beach where... On @Sioflynn, the joys of daily life continued. On @FurAllCatkind scenes of intensifying tragedy mediated unfolding events (Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Noumea). Images pair across the accounts, archiving motifs in two modes, a bakery v baking with hay and animal feed. A camping holiday v. the camps. Each is a record of someone I don’t want to forget, who was and then wasn’t, caught and archived permanently now on Instagram, reel, story, image. Children. Mothers. Fathers. Helpers. Who can grasp the entirety of this digital record? Cross-platform, multi-perspectival, an infinity plus one. Tales that will not be told, and for many now, not remembered as generational memories and knowledge of family and community are erased. 29 January 2024 - 10 February 2024. Hind Rajab. There are many moments we can speak of when the world changed. When the world has changed. I ran a series of images every day to mark the days of searching until. The image generated by Midjourney video from one of these on June 24 2025 astonishes me. The first in this new series. It ends with the cover of a black book swinging shut. As we cannot speak of this, you can interpret that as you will. I ran these intertwined storyworlds ran in parallel trajectories to recontextualize and unsettle the normalization of an ongoing dehumanization. The othering of neighbours and communities. Here, CatKind, as proxies for the LOLcat ambassadors of the internet, are remediations of what can’t be fully measured, recast via Midjourney’s capacity for alterity and alienation of the nostalgic familiar. Who doesn’t love cats? We can always post about cats. We have #Caturday after all. A day dedicated to cats everywhere intertwining with the logics of global techno-capitalism and authoritarianism. *WCNSF*. Grief without end. Then I stopped. December 8, 2024. Speaking at Harvard in 2023 on the legacies of colonial violence, forced displacements, and what it means to write as an “other,” Viet Thanh Nguyen concluded his talk, “the challenge of the writer as an other is to expand that grief, to make it ever more capacious rather than reducing it to a singular sorrow. Capacious grief acknowledges that the trauma of the other is neither singular nor unique. That there are others out there with whom we can share the burden. Perhaps only by expanding our grief might we be able to leave our trauma behind. And in sharing our burden of writing, of representation, of otherness, we might also transform that burden into a gift.” How do we collectively carry the burdens of cities, societies, and communities razed in modern times? Is there the possibility of *capacious grief* in the year and years ahead? I hope And yet...

Image & Video Credits & Works Cited Cover: Félix Bonfils (French, 1831 - 1885). “Palestine: Jaffa, pris de la mer.” 1877. Getty Digital Collection. Public Domain. No. 84.XO.1167.16. Passage 2. Francis Frith (English, 1822 -1898). “The Old Town. Gaza.” 1860. Getty Digital Collection. Public Domain. No. 84.XZ.578.1.21. Passage 4. Auguste Salzmann (French, 1824 - 1872) Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard (French, 1802 - 1872). “Jérusalem. [Porte d’Hérode].” 1854. Getty Digital Collection. Public Domain. No. 84.XO.766.6.42. Passage 6. Félix Bonfils (French, 1831 - 1885). “La fontaine d'Elisee, Palestine.” 1867–1870. Getty Digital Collection. Public Domain. No. 84.XM.1021.47. Passage 8. Unknown Artist/maker. [Garden of Gethsemane, Jerusalem] about 1860. Getty Digital Collection. Public Domain. No. 84.XC.873.1699. All other images and videos were co-created with Midjourney. ~~~ Works Referenced. Agamben, Giorgio. *Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.* 1998. Calvino, Italo. *Invisible Cities.* New York ; London : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Foucault, Michel. *The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979*. 2009. Habegger-Conti, Jena. Infinity Plus One: The Thousand and One Nights as a Model for Infinite Narrative in Borges, Calvino, Barth and Rushdie. PhD Dissertation. University of Toronto, 2007. Paula Levine. *Shadows From Another Place*. *San Francisco <-> Baghdad*. 2004. https://paulalevine.net/portfolio_page/shadows-from-another-place-san-francisco-baghdad/ Mbembé, Achille. "Necropolitics." *Public Culture* 15(1):11-40. (2003) Viet Thanh Nguyen | *Norton Lecture 1: On the Double, or Inauthenticity*. Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center. Sept. 25, 2023. https://vietnguyen.info/ [[Not Yet the End|The End]]

*(In)Visible Cities* *…2025* Siobhan O’Flynn Toronto MIX2025 MIX Conference. July 2, 2025. Bath Spa University

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54587176591/in/dateposted-public/" title="Getty 2_Public Domain"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54587176591_d7c8d45134_z.jpg" width="640" height="486" alt="Getty 2_Public Domain"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> **CITIES & SHAME 1** ~~~ *The Ephemeral Foundation* The Ancient called her sage men and wise women to her and asked “What is the colour of shame?” Not for acts that I have done rather for what I haven’t done. What is the colour of shame for the razing of a city? All could see the trajectory. Not inevitable. Never inevitable. Only inevitable in the absence of action. The trajectory of loss, across families, across generations. Future possibles, possible futures. Vanish, vanished as if vapour in air. The crumbling of streets and bedrooms, books and bones whispering in the rubble. Small hands and rebar indistinguishable in the dust. And one day the city was no more. Find me the colour of shame. I will weave a memorial for the lost voices, so the world cannot forget what will be [[forgotten]].

In time, the Ancient concluded that Ephermeral Foundation was as complete as it could ever possibly be. The wise, scholars, the learned and poets gathered. Tell me wise ones, what is the colour of shame? The young scholar stepped forward. The colour of shame is the colour of pulverized concrete, a dust shaded white and grey, that can absorbe all the colours of blood and body, all the colours of our kin, creature, plant, bird, and bee. A dust and grit that subsumes all hope. A dust that blankets what remains such that none can be recognized. A dust that fragments the many into the unrecognizable, the unnamed. The colour of shame articulates the logics of biopolitics, of necropolitics, of the *homo sacer*, of surveillance, of targeting from above and afar. The colour of shame is the grip to extinction. The colour of shame is what remains after ecocide. When sister waters flow no more. When the land can no longer sing, when the land's wisdom can no longer be heard. When there is no birdsong. No sound of bees in orchards. No rustle of kites iin the sky. No children. The Ancient nodded. I/We will remember[[.]]

This is a tale of seemingly disparate worlds. The ordinary everyday and the segmented, surveilled, and secluded zones of what Achille Mbembe termed, "necropolitics" (2003; 2019). These zones collide and entangle on social media, geopolitical distinctions flattened and sharpened in the juxtaposition of cats and crises, *Caturday* and *Calls for Action*. Both zones are subject to and shaped by the logics of surveillance, biopower, and the teleological end-goal of total domination. The fictions of consumer choice and abundance in stark contrast with what Giorgio Agamben defined as "bare life" (1998). One world is visible here. The other appears as "augmented reality" layers synced with the Halo AR app (iOS & Android) Run the Twine on one device. View the AR via a mobile or tablet. Download the Halo App in iOS or Android Play. Scan the QR code to access @FurAllCatkind AR media. <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54612065822/in/album-72177720326845039" title="(In)Visible Cities Halo QR Code"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54612065822_3c2125d273_m.jpg" width="240" height="240" alt="(In)Visible Cities Halo QR Code"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> *Alternate images appear on pages with the strawberry, lower left or right.* <a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54605122498/in/dateposted-public/" title="Stawberry"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54605122498_c94b4fb12a_t.jpg" width="85" height="100" alt="Stawberry"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> I created these images to [[remember.]]

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54587388084/in/dateposted-public/" title="Getty 3_Public Domain"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54587388084_388fa0e782_w.jpg" width="400" height="331" alt="Getty 3_Public Domain"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> *(In)Visible Cities* 146 BC … June 16, 2025 What does it mean to “raze” a city? What does it mean to *want* to raze a city? I write this on the day after Trump announced on Truth Social that ICE would deliver “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” targeting “America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.” In 2025, we are witness to the razing of cities, in Ukraine and Gaza. Aleppo in the recent past, and possibly cities in Iran and Israel in the near future. Roman sources tells us Cato the Elder ended every speech in the Senate calling for Carthage’s destruction as the greatest threat to Rome. Pliny the Elder, Aurelius Victor, Florus, record variants of *Ceterum (autem) censeo Carthaginem esse delendam*. The shortened phrase *Carthago delenda est* appears in contemporary politics, as a flourish and/or a threat. Infamously, Mark Zuckerberg wore a black T emblazoned with *Carthago delenda est* on his 40th birthday. The tech billionaire’s face beams blithely above this slogan advocating genocide, “Carthage must be destroyed.” What does it mean to create in a time when we can watch cities being ground into dust? What does it mean to raze millennia old orchards and ancient sites? Destruction pummeling meters deep into the earth? In the city where I live, we speak of lost creeks and waterways. Some were rerouted. Some buried underground. There is a manhole cover in the middle of the street in one of our oldest immigrant neighbourhoods, where, on a quiet day, you can hear the creek waters running towards the lake. What does it mean to witness the obliteration of waterways? Lakes and rivers around the world are held as sacred and a number have been recognized as having legal personhood. What is a land without its waterways, wells, and [[springs]]? *Additional note* On Friday June 27, 2025, executives from Meta, OpenAI, Thinking Machines Lab and Palantir were sworn in to the military at the rank of lieutenant colonel in the newly announced Executive Innovation Corps. As one headline announced, “Silicon Valley companies are abandoning safety policies to win Pentagon contracts, turning everyday AI into weapons systems.” Quartz June 23. The GenAI tools we use for whimsy, experimentation, wonderment, research, therapy, and more now intersect with the weaponized surveillance ambitions of the US military.

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54617038612/in/dateposted-public/" title="1st For All Catkind Feb 4 2024"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54617038612_f0d2cbfcf1_q.jpg" width="150" height="150" alt="1st For All Catkind Feb 4 2024"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> ~~~ For All CatKind (@FurAllCatkind on Instagram) began Feb. 3, 2024 as a response to the bifurcation of (social) media coverage of world crises. The initial series of Midjourney images envisioned life in an idyllic seaside town, cats going about in their daily lives. On the beach flying kites, picnicking, riding in donkey carts, visiting shops, orchards, fields, and market day. Instagram’s uncritical juxtaposition of cats and catastrophes recalled differently the dislocative juxtaposition of “here” and “there” in Paula Levine’s 2004 seminal geolocative work, *Shadows from Another Place: San Francisco<->Baghdad*, which transposed an interactive and updating GPS map layer of the US bombings of Baghdad onto a map of San Francisco. The dissonance of the images, of my positionality and privilege, witnessing, safe, the razing of cities through distancing screens. The scale of erasure underway led me to start a second record, twinned yet increasingly divergent. How many of us have never spoken of what we have witnessed? I never did, and I don’t now. I knew that I would forget. I would forget the details, the moments, the words, the faces, the living, the dead, over time, in the continuous stream of new videos, images, and audio. Each image I posted encoded with image, audio, video from afar. The woman who… The child who… The doctor who… The journalist who... The cat that... The building where… The beach where... On @Sioflynn, the joys of daily life continued. On @FurAllCatkind scenes of intensifying tragedy mediated unfolding events across multiple cities and regions. Images pair across the accounts, archiving motifs in two modes, a bakery v baking with hay and animal feed. A camping holiday v. the camps. Each is a record of someone I don’t want to forget, who was and then wasn’t, caught and archived permanently now on Instagram, reel, story, image. Children. Mothers. Fathers. Helpers. Who can grasp the entirety of this digital record? Cross-platform, multi-perspectival, this dispersed archive defies a conception of the whole, and yet, the record exists on platforms driven by the logics of surveillance capitalism and the 24/7 rendering of all of our algorithmic identities. To conceive the whole as recoverable recalls what Jena Habegger-Conti described as a narrative space of "infinity plus one" modelled in the works of Borges, Calvino, Barth and Rushdie. I evoke Calvino's "model for infinite narrative" in my *(In)visible Cities* with a narrative gesture to what was and is now gone and which continues in the space of what is ironically termed *social* media. Calvino envisioned Marco Polo describing to Kublai Khan fantastical cities each a mediation of Venice as an "infinite space for story creation" (Conti). The two series, For All Catkind and @FurAllCatkind circle events that were and are visible, still online, and yet, I/we do not speak of what I/we see. There are stories that will be lost, histories that will not be remembered, photo albums, records, archives shredded to a degree that would defy an archivist or archeologist hoping to reconstitute the fragments into something legible. Generational memories, family histories, community records, [[gone]].

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/202999762@N06/54618164279/in/dateposted-public/" title="FurAllCatkind"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54618164279_19999c0749.jpg" width="378" height="500" alt="FurAllCatkind"/></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script> ~~~ I ran these intertwined storyworlds in parallel trajectories to recontextualize and unsettle the normalization of an ongoing dehumanization. The othering of neighbours and communities. Here, CatKind, as proxies for the LOLcat ambassadors of the internet, are remediations of what can’t be fully measured, recast via Midjourney’s capacity for alterity and alienation of the nostalgic familiar. Who doesn’t love cats? We can always post about cats. We have #Caturday after all. A day dedicated to cats everywhere interlocked with the logics of global techno-capitalism, techno-colonialism, and techno-authoritarianism. What is there to say after *WCNSF*? What aid? What relief? And how to effect what is needed. Then I stopped posting. December 8, 2024. Speaking at Harvard in 2023 on the legacies of colonial violence, forced displacements, and what it means to write as an “other,” Viet Thanh Nguyen concluded his talk, “the challenge of the writer as an other is to expand that grief, to make it ever more capacious rather than reducing it to a singular sorrow. Capacious grief acknowledges that the trauma of the other is neither singular nor unique. That there are others out there with whom we can share the burden. Perhaps only by expanding our grief might we be able to leave our trauma behind. And in sharing our burden of writing, of representation, of otherness, we might also transform that burden into a gift.” How do we collectively carry the burden of accountability for cities, and communities razed in modern times? Is there the possibility of *capacious grief* in the year and years ahead? Looking back over both the Instagram accounts and the many unposted Midjourney experiments, it is an unusual record of so much I would have forgotten with an imperfect memory. In the fictional world of *For All Catkind* and @FurAllCatkind, the following album is a brief [[remediation|touching]] of moments.