A geologic For Loop::
for (initial [city]; increment [scaffolds]; limit [futurity]) { ... }
Out of this ground, just like last Wednesday, another new thing is rising up quick.
Downtown, the middle of it all, this middled thing mounts and rises, and rising it spreads. Hard shapes cut the sky, shifting its geometry, lacerating pricks. The city is billowing up and distending out into turbid bloats of material, slow sly scratches to the air. Cranes peer from odd angles, another each day, multiplying without sex. Ritual alterations jangle about, crash-sounded, laughing up high about a new angle made, the lack of sway, the web of shit pulled together to bloat the city. Something added, airless chasms.
And one day a building seems to have just pushed itself out from the tangle of scaffold lines and the labor caught in their frames. Elements resolved with screws and money into substances, into a city. Quiet descends, very crude, with a lack of urgency.
Capital circuits around in rectangular prisms. Workers’ hands as heavy as the earth sink deeper and deeper from the wrists as the day winds down. The promise of a building (foreboding, a hunch) is braced and floated by the strong arms of scaffolded construction sites. It’s a promise that sets us in a time span outside the everyday, throws us unconsenting into the scape of a dream of the not-yet. [Technofuturity]. The stuff animating this skyline churns in a way that can’t be looked at as a whole, or a setting for activity, an ecology to which it is obliged.
It’s all happening very fast like wind borne metals just skirting up out of the bedrock. In contrast, on legs, I’m real slug-stepper popping along, dopey and deficient, slack with the monotony of the pedestrian pathed loop-life lived against the pulse of a city that says Act Quick! and Wheel! to work. The busses don't run with regularity here.
Everyone’s gotten into riding these electroboards perched on a singular wheel, and whizzing on two-wheeled scooters in a posture all upright with daintly braided legs, and driving fast in caged trucks with names like “defender” or “explorer”. These are stratal methods of living on a plane, skirting On Top in a metallic drift.
A city like this breeds a wheeling-past attentions, softens the abrasions of life on cement, offering a lot of zinc-white interiors to skree-up to and throw the wheels down outside of, and a lot of sunny afternoons, and a few water sports that let you stand-up on the surface of it all without ever getting wet. Drawing us to do nothing on the surface of a city.
[Technotopia]. Legs are out of date. [Technogeologic]. Mechanic speed operates with ease here, luring the city’s inhabitants into its wide-reaching gizmo structures so they scoot along without ever needing to walk the feet on the ground. [Technometabolic]. Inclusion in this structure is a process, a hum, a magnetic pull-up from every angle. [Technolamina]. It’s ambient, sedimentary, ever-present, stretched-out and elusive; an engine as much as a scaffold, as much as a bad idea that you can’t shake. [Technodynamic]. Awareness of its presence may undulate in waves, like the way all this cement falls over limestone; sometimes calcified and strong, sometimes all aired-out and falling-in. [Technoaero]. To make oneself aware of that transparent thing [Technocity] as it unfolds across space and time requires endless scales of soled attunements. There’s a foot pace needed here to pay attention to that hyperobject – that heft force of Technocapitalism – a steady gait that will reveal how fast things drive. It’ll always leave you getting lapped by the wheeled ones. There’s a brand of sunglasses not invented yet that will let you see past the reflections streaked across the glass-dressed skyscrapers.
City’s speeding and we’re warped weird in reflections on the mirrored towers, stitching the roads together again and again with each wheel, with each crooked version of our bodies cast across it all. Jerked into the stream. A traffic body deluge slipping along mispronounced streets, over bridges, over the gully body of the rivers. It all grips and it glues. Cyborg congestion in the thick fog of ragweed air, scraping metals and circuit boards along the routes mapped by IBM.
Late, in the 7/11 three blocks away from The Construction Site , the hot tray that rotates taquitos are still rolling even though theres no taquitos left. They’re just rolling empty, looking like something else, like maybe the inside of one of those trucks made to toss cement. Tubes greased-out from the day spinning all at the same speed and never touching one another, never slowing down, not taking a breath. I guess they’ll go all night. Mechanic bore, tedious turns, stabilizers all lined up.
The word environ derives from the French virer, “to turn”. On what axis is all this turning, around what center do all these turbulent whirls of material and labor rotate? What is the world actually made of? More than its base materiality. Resolved into facades, imposing themselves as rationality.
One [Technomedium] saturates another. Heaving us up, lugging us along. These crashing, splayed medianatures suspend us and press us flat, draw us out in a planed gray line. We’re a running slap of cement and we’re getting pulled across, points involuted the yearning geometry of a wove-out [Techno-organism]. The routes our wheels ride are getting reshaped weekly with the fevered mutations of a lifting city. Strange Tide. Counter Momentum. Infrastructural Cross-Drift. The thick now of the lunch hour.