30 Words for the City is an ambitious attempt to put sound and vision together in the form of an interactive book. The opening screen for John Colette’s new CD-ROM contains rows of thumbnail images, each depicting an element of urban life.
As far as interactivity goes, 30 Words for the City is a relatively one-way experience. The power to select a word is little more than that allowed a reader to open a book. Yet, Colette’s intention is certainly to provide space for the reader: the sequences of words are deliberately abstract and designed to trigger personal memories. We have here testimony to Colette’s belief in the possibility of a personal consciousness within the city. The city not as abstract machine inhabited by automatons, but as a imaginary space for collating a sense of self. This CD-ROM, therefore is a kind of multimedia haiku where elements of urban life--Telephone, Aeroplane, Building Bilboard, Subway, Apartment--are offered in fragmentary form in order to tease out the nascent poetry inside us harried urban dwellers.
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