In SC, the Surface City, nothing is hidden from the city as all the activities happen on the surfaces of buildings. The city may seem gravity-free and floating in the air from a visitor's point of view. However, to the SC citizens, gravity does exist wherever the buildings are: they can stand on any surface of a building, vertical or horizontal, smooth or rough. They can also go anywhere from anywhere, as long as there is substance connecting the starting and the end point.
It is said that SC has 98 districts, but no one has been to all of them. According to hearsay, SC-0 is a void district with no building at all; SC-1, SC-2, and SC-3 are districts with only one plane, where citizens living on its two sides never meet for their entire lives. There are many districts just a little less boring than these four, which are also one plane but with some peaks and valleys.
However, there are some very attractive districts, like SC-39. While having a few buildings and residents, the district has a clean and minimalist style. Citizens in other districts love gazing at SC-39 from far away, just to escape from the complexity/monotonicity of their districts.
The most structured and convenient district is SC-68, with just the right amount of buildings and just the right ways of surface connections. Wherever a citizen wants to travel within the district, there is a way. The buildings are the perfect labyrinth for children’s hide-and-seek, but not too confusing to allow them to find their way home.
SC-97 is the most frightening district with many fading ends. Many things seem to be the same as SC-68: dense buildings, countless surface connections, etc. However, there is minimal breathing space; it is a labyrinth that no one can get out of. The best way to survive one has to be cautious enough to avoid those fading ends, which will swallow them into nothingness. Nothingness is different from death; one may be technically still alive in nothingness, but all proof of their existence is erased from the world — even more horrible than death. As the number of people vanishing drastically increases, the remaining residents begin to be aware of this fact and start to panic. A few people also become curious about where those people went, and bring up a hypothesis that the vanished people actually “entered” the buildings. But what does “enter” mean? Isn’t everything just directly accessible, right on the surface?
SC-68:
SC-39:
SC-41:
Our city is built with p5.js coding and Adobe Illustrator. We first used Adobe Illustrator to create tile images, which were fed into our p5.js code for cityscape generation. The technique we adapted is the Wave Function Collapse model introduced in our workshop.
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
- Ustwo Studio Ltd., Monument Valley
- Sukeban Games, VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action