Le città invisibili as Cybertext and Cyberspace: Italo Calvino, Ted Nelson, and Arata Isozaki

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers the place of Le città invisibili within the debate on cybernetics, both as a product of its time as well as a harbinger of the future advent of network culture. It proposes to interpret the two most emblematic images of the book – the enchanted palace of the Kublai Khan, and the everchanging ‘invisible cities’ visited by Marco Polo – as Calvino’s personal contribution to the definition of cybertext and cyberspace. Curiously, the same emblematic images are also found in the work of two of Calvino’s contemporaries: the American pioneer of information technology Ted Nelson, and the Japanese architect and exponent of the Metabolist movement Arata Isozaki. Through a comparative analysis, this article shows how the new concept of information brought by cybernetics crystallised in virtually identical images and metaphors across disciplines and cultures: in literature, with Calvino, in computer science with Nelson, and in architecture with Isozaki.