Ersilia, the Invisible City
Ersilia is a city imagined by Cuban-Italian writer Italo Calvino in his book 'Invisible Cities'. Calvino's vivid description of the city is a perfect metaphore for our mission.
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, or authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.
Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
DALL·E is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system developed by OpenAI. DALL·E reads text and creates images based on it. We asked DALL·E to imagine the Ersilia.
Poles and strings
Realistic painting
Realistic painting II
Renascentist painting
With multicolored strings
In Africa
Drawing
Just a painting
Crayons
Realistic painting III
Last modified 1yr ago