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06/24/2005 Archived Entry: "Virtual Cities"

Notes on Virtual Cities
Two important theoretical works regarding the various virtual cities ideas floating around these days on the Web:
1. Baudrillard: commutation (all signs exchanged against each other and not the real)
2. Calvino: Invisble Cities (a city is the result of a discursive exchange, not a referenced thing)

Here is GeoSim.

Imagine precise and realistic looking 3D-models of actual cities - cities you can navigate through, shop in, or just admire.

GeoSim cities allow for a better understanding of the physical world, by enabling exploration of the virtual one.

Our first response with the virtual is to make it do the work of the real. This has always been the role of pedagogy as well. But instead of only opting for referentiality (the familiar), the technology could be used to generate the unreal (the unfamiliar). The imaginative. The memory map meets GeoSims meets Del.icio.us meets Flickr world. HP almost imagined this possibility with the now fairly dead concept of CoolTown...but even if CoolTown succeeded, it would be only BlackBoard or WebCT with global positioning. Or it would be Tech Town, Wayne State's financial venture into technology and urban planning.
These are all print concepts (print as ideology and not as paper). They are fixed concepts with fixed reference.. A virtual urbanity should go beyond that thinking. Its markers should be exchanged against each other, not against a referenced place or concept. Thus, Del.icio.us’ s potential to expand new media logic. Digital Detroit is not Detroit. It is a series of exchanges, like Calvino's Venice. The very essence of virtuality:

virtual
adj 1: being actually such in almost every respect; "a practical
failure"; "the once elegant temple lay in virtual
ruin" [syn: virtual, practical]