A City is Not a Computer

A digital meditation, made using Bitsy by Adam Le Doux. The user is one of a large team of human operators in a city-wide automated control centre, scanning through a synthetic map of 'tasks' generated by the system, and reading the comments appended by their fellow operators, as they attempt to coordinate a response. Boredom, bad data, and Sisyphean taskings, as well as hoaxes, sensor vandalism, and signal noise, make up the bulk of the day-to-day tedium facing these operators, who are the unheralded 'dull, dirty, back-end' of the wondrous new 'smart, self-regulating city'.

This piece is partly an experiment in generativity using Bitsy, and so contains vastly more text than can be typically encountered over the course of a single play session. Look for the dots, and follow the routes of the thick black lines, in order to navigate and interact with this piece. There is no end goal to be reached, although sessions will 'time out' after a certain number of steps. No content warnings as such, but this piece does allude to themes of surveillance, policing, and state coercion more broadly.

A City is Not a Computer is named after the essay and book by scholar, theorist, and critic Shannon Mattern. Quotations from the essay can be found throughout a given playthrough, which critique the very scenario depicted in this piece, of urban planning being supposedly reducible to algorithms and data-gathering.

Plays with ambient sound.