Thoughts, critique and references by Kent Barshov

Kent Barshov, an American born physician practicing medicine in Israel bought my eBook The Metropolis Organism and wrote the following thoughtful and thorough response:




Frank, greetings

I eagerly and quickly read through your enhanced e-book on the metropolis organism shortly after it arrived in my in-box.  That was almost a month ago, and since then I've flown to American and back (from my home in Israel) and so I had opportunity once again to look at various cities and cityscapes from the air.

My printer at home doesn't function the best, so it's hard for me to print out a hard copy of your book. Normally in responding to your ideas, I would have underlined things here and there in order to respond point by point. Since I haven't done that, I'm responding with a few notes I jotted down as I was reading your book.

I am a physician and so have had training in biology both as an undergraduate and during medical school (where biology morphs into being looked at as physiology, pathology, etc.).

I loved your gallery of photographs of different cities around the world, and your illustrations and short videos as a whole throughout your work. I, like you, just enjoy looking at such things.

I loved your metaphor of looking at cities as a species of an organism. For me that concept as a metaphor is almost self-evident. For example, journal advertisements in the medical profession, to sell a drug or a new procedure, are often based on how a cell or human body is like a city--- so that idea is rather common, if underutilized.

Also historically there's the idea of how a human body is a microcosm of the greater universe or macrocosm. To my knowledge this metaphor was at it peak during the early days of the scientific revolution in the 1600s. So I see that your city as organism is conceptually close to the historic microcosm-macrocosm idea.

I typed in "body as a city" in Google images and this is one of the things I found. It's not exactly an illustration from a medical advertisement, but it gets the idea across. The image shows how a monitoring system is like the human circulation.

On my gut level I don't literally accept that cities are an organism, but I recognize the power and beauty of the metaphor.  But I realize there are some scientists who are conceptually close to what you're driving at.  For example, there is the idea fostered by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson that an ant colony simply serves to foster its gene pool and the whole colony itself could be looked at as being a single super-organism.  Then there's the idea of the Gaia hypothesis that the whole earth is a single organism.

Also the mathematical concept of fractals as applied to biological phenomena gives beautiful insights into how self-similar structures appear from microscopic to macroscopic levels.  The veins in a leaf are replicated in the tributaries of a river, etc.

Would you apply your same logic to looking at a termite mound or beehive as you do to cities?---- that termites or bees are not the creators of their collective homes?

Ultimately I don't believe in city-as-an-organism, microcosm-macrocosm, Gaia hypothesis or sociobiology. I see their power and beauty as metaphors, but at the end of the day I accept them only as metaphors.

I've studied Marshall McLuhan's thought about how communication-instruments are tools which shape the user, and about his concept of the whole world becoming a "global village."  For me, more than individual cities being separate organisms, I think we are moving into a stage that the whole planet will function like a single city, and thus I see that we're moving closer to the conceptual framework of the Gaia hypothesis--- which again for me functions as a metaphor rather than an external, objective reality.

Also a New Urbanist by the name Michael Arth has put out a documentary film about his urban rehabilitation of a neighborhood in a city in central Florida. Here is part of a review of the film on "Amazon" which combines some of Marshall McLuhan's thought and the transhumanistic ideas with which you end your book "Metropolis Organism."
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Quotation from film review:

This finally leads into the subject that the "New Urban Cowboy" is the first in a trilogy of films under production by Arth. The second film is to be about the "Twelve Labors of Hercules" on how to approach some of the world's most pressing problems, and the third film is to be about the ultimate extension of what Arth labels as his own personal philosophy, which is "Secular Transhumanism"--- which is in part the using of technology to transcend current boundaries in human life. In this Arth was preceded by the 1960s media-analyst Marshall McLuhan who was quoted as saying that "the computer holds out the promise of a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the 'logos' that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace." The rejoinder by McLuhan's interviewer was that "Isn't this projection of an electronically induced world-consciousness more mystical than technological?" To which McLuhan replied, "Yes--- as mystical as most advanced theories of modern nuclear physics. Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today."
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As I mentioned in my initial previous email to you, I love cities and urban planning, and so I'm very glad to have obtained your enhanced e-book for a case beautifully presented.

You've probably come across the movie "Baraka" (from 1992) which is a "non-narrative" film. There are a few scenes of urban life which are looked at abstractly.These scenes in "Baraka" are to me are almost hypnotically beautiful. If you haven't seen the film, I think you would really enjoy seeing the urban scenes.

Also, there's a TV documentary series which is available to be seen for free on the internet. The TV series on "How Buildings Learn" was made by Steward Brand.  I think you would enjoy watching the series.  Stewart Brand's first claim to fame was putting out the "Whole Earth Catalogue" back in the early days of the ecology movement.

A statement you made on page 128 of your book is the closest area where I come into agreement with you. You wrote: "There is a force animating germination and growth of cities. It is the same unknown force that breathed life into the lifeless inorganic molecules swirling in the primordial sea four billion years ago. I have no idea what that force is, but I know it exists. I call that force the biological imperative."

I leave you with two extensive collections of information. The first is a write-up with links to watch the TV series by Stewart Brand, and the second is a write-up about transhumanism by Michael Arth.

I hope you enjoy this material.  Sincerely, Kent Bar-Shov
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How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
By Stewart Brand

The following was written by Steward Brand:

This six-part, three-hour, BBC TV series aired in 1997. I presented and co-wrote the series; it was directed by James Muncie, with music by Brian Eno. The series was based on my 1994 book, HOW BUILDINGS LEARN: What Happens After They're Built. The book is still selling well and is used as a text in some college courses. Most of the 27 reviews on Amazon treat it as a book about system and software design, which tells me that architects are not as alert as computer people. But I knew that; that's part of why I wrote the book. Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like. Please don't bug me with requests for permission. Hack away. Do credit the BBC, who put considerable time and talent into the project. Historic note: this was one of the first television productions made entirely in digital--- shot digital, edited digital. The project wound up with not enough money, so digital was the workaround. The camera was so small that we seldom had to ask permission to shoot; everybody thought we were tourists. No film or sound crew. Everything technical on site was done by editors, writers, directors. That's why the sound is a little sketchy, but there's also some direct perception in the filming that is unusual. __________________________________________________________________

Part 1:  "Flow"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8639555925486210852&ei=GfksS7vzDISs2wLjqpzYBQ&q=how+building+learn&view=3
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Part 2: "The Low Road"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8639555925486210852&ei=GfksS7vzDISs2wLjqpzYBQ&q=how+building+learn&view=3#docid=5088653796598486022


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Part 3: "Built for Change"  (Includes the line: "a building is not something you finish; a building is something you start." )

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8639555925486210852&ei=GfksS7vzDISs2wLjqpzYBQ&q=how+building+learn&view=3#docid=6141960341438553915
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Part 4: "Unreal Estate"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8639555925486210852&ei=GfksS7vzDISs2wLjqpzYBQ&q=how+building+learn&view=3#docid=-8761299882173964035
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Part 5: "The Romance of Maintenance"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8639555925486210852&ei=GfksS7vzDISs2wLjqpzYBQ&q=how+building+learn&view=3#docid=5407846553590755822
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Part 6: "Shearing Layers"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2283224496826631552&ei=AUYxS8mvLaem2AK6oPWEDw&q=how+building+learn+part+6&view=3

(Book Review)

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How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand. 1994. New York: Viking Penguin.

All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong. There's no escape from this grim syllogism, but it can be softened.

From these words, Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalog fame, has crafted a book that calls forth memo-ries of several other writers (e.g., J. B. Jackson's Dis-covering the Vernacular Landscape and Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House), while still being an im-portant new addition to architectural theory. Writing in a hip, management-theory style filled with acronyms and alliteration, Brand banters his way into real insights about the nature of change in buildings that so often seem permanent.

Brand presents his basic argument in an early chapter, "Shearing Layers," which argues that any building is actually a hierarchy of pieces, each of which inherently changes at different rates. In his business-consulting manner, he calls these the "Six S's" (borrowed in part from British architect and historian F. Duffy's "Four S's" of capital investment in build-ings).

The Site is eternal; the Structure is good for 30 to 300 years ("but few buildings make it past 60, for other reasons"); the Skin now changes every 15 to 20 years due to both weathering and fashion; the Services (wiring, plumbing, kitchen appliances, heating and cooling) change every seven to 15 years, perhaps faster in more technological settings; Space Planning, the inte-rior partitioning and pedestrian flow, changes every two or three years in offices and lasts perhaps 30 years in the most stable homes; and the innermost layers of Stuff (furnishings) change continually.

Brand is still an ecologist at heart, and he draws on what is called an hierarchical concept of ecosystems to surmise that the slow-to-change elements of the build-ing drive the quick-to-change--the site is a determinant of structure, the structure drives the skin, and so on down to the level of furniture:

A design imperative emerges: An adaptive building has to allow slippage between the differently-paced systems of Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space Plan, and Stuff. Otherwise the slow sys-tems block the flow of the quick ones, and the quick ones tear up the slow ones with their constant change. Embedding the systems together may look efficient at first, but over time it is the oppo-site, and destructive as well. Thus, pouring concrete on the ground for an instant foundation ("slab-on-grade") is maladaptive--pipes are foolishly buried, and there's no basement space for stor-age, expansion, maintenance, and Services access. Timber-frame buildings, on the other hand, conveniently separate Structure, Skin, and Services, while balloon-frame (standard stud construc-tion) over-connects them (p. 20).

Over-connection is only one flaw Brand notes in the difficulty of modifying modern (and particularly Modern) buildings. In a central series of chapters, Brand takes great glee in blasting 20th-century archi-tects from Wright to Pei for their pictorial over-emphasis on the central layers of the model--Structure, Skin and Services, and primarily the central of these three--and a willingness to divorce these from the lay-ers before and after.

These buildings have been designed as sculptural (and eminently photographable) objects, unable to move or adapt, perfect in their moment of pre-habitation. In criticizing this practice, Brand uses the very tool that the "magazine architects" have used for justification: the still photograph. But Brand subverts the formal purity of the designs by photographing these buildings with people using them, by stacking up photos taken over time, and by comparing these pho-tos with similar images of other buildings less hindered by the immaculate moment of their creation.

In short, Brand replaces the narrative of created form with a more humane narrative of habitation. This is the central and existential theme of the book--that we have narrative rather than static connections with places, and that habitation is always active and pur-poseful. "Age plus adaptivity," says Brand (p. 23), "is what makes a building come to be loved. The building learns from its occupants, and they learn from it."

The final chapters offers Brand's way out of this mess, which is to offer a more fluid version of what architects have conventionally called programming. Brand calls his approach "scenario planning":

The product of skilled scenario work is not a plan but a strategy. Where a plan is based on prediction, a strategy is designed to encompass unforeseeably changing conditions. A good strategy ensures that, no matter what happens, you always have maneuver-ing room (p. 178).

The way to soften the inevitable need for building revi-sion, Brand argues, is to fully understand that revisions are inevitable in buildings from highest Monticello to the lowest gas station, that our relationships with places are as inherently fluid as our relationships with people.

Brand's book playfully humanizes the shifting landscape through photos and captions that offer the reader a temporal, narrative connection with these al-tered places. In this way, Brand offers the environ-mental design professions a vital glimpse of what the past hundred years of magazine architecture has almost taken away--an understanding of habitation.

Overall, How Buildings Learn is an "almost-great" book. Certainly, it does what Brand set out to do: to humanize and temporalize the world of buildings and help remove them from the limbo of the perfect object. But what he misses, somehow, is a sense of affection for the places he shows us. He writes, glibly and with detachment, about a phenomenon that obviously has human--and not simply functional--origins. He helps us see but not feel these places. Luckily, the photographs give us more than Brand himself intends they should, and they save him.

--Herb Childress
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          UNICE - Abstract
          Click
    Definition of UNICE

    Pronunciation: you-niss
    Function: noun
      1. UNICE: Etymology: An acronym for Universal Network of Intelligent Conscious Entities, the hive-like consciousness that is theorized to emerge from the interpenetration of computers, humans and advanced forms of the Internet. UNICE will be composed of a collective consciousness, or group mind, and numberless individuals. It will also be capable of producing any number of protean, non-biological entities.

      Also a homonym with Eunice, a woman's name ("Good Victory" in Greek), and: uni- (meaning "whole", or "all of") + us, or you + us. UNICE looks like U-NICE, which as "you nice" could be a hopeful description of UNICE in pidgin English.

      Alternative spelling: sometimes written as EUNICE, but only when referring specifically to the Earth's portion of UNICE. (I.E. Earth's Universal Network of Intelligent Conscious Entities).

      2. UNICE: Forthcoming feature documentary about UNICE.

      3. UNICE: (obsolete usage) formerly an acronym for Union of Industrial and Employers' Confederation of Europe. Now known as BusinessEurope.

    What is UNICE? UNICE is an acronym for Universal Network of Intelligent Conscious Entities, a term coined by artist and futurist Michael E. Arth in the 1990s to describe a new form of intelligent life that he and many others theorize will soon emerge on Earth from a hive-like interaction of computers, humans, and future forms of the Internet. Arth believes that a local form of UNICE will envelope Earth and then, unbounded by biological substrate, will propagate outward into the wider universe. If there is an existing, self-aware Cosmic Internet beyond this planet, our local UNICE could eventually join up with and merge with the greater UNICE. The acronym EUNICE is sometimes used to differentiate Earth's Universal Network of Intelligent Conscious Entities from a truly universal UNICE.

    Thus, the term UNICE refers to what will probably happen on Earth and what will or perhaps has already happened throughout the universe or multiverse. UNICE is what will result from accelerating technological change that appears to be leading to a computational or technological singularity. The term Singularity, usually capitalized to differentiate it from a black hole or mathematical singularity, has been described by Ray Kurzweil as "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history". Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, a description and prediction about this accelerating pace of technological change, is a further elaboration of Moore's law.

    The first published use of the term Singularity in this context has been credited to mathematician John Von Neumann in 1958, while I.J. Good wrote of an intelligence explosion in 1965. Verner Vinge popularized the term beginning in the 1980s and wrote an essay in 1993 titled The Coming Technological Singularity. Inside the singularity surrounding a black hole, gravitation is so strong that not even light cannot escape. Applying this metaphorically to the evolution of technologies such as genetics, robotics, computation, and nanotechnology, the Singularity refers a point in the future beyond which it is impossible from our current perspective to shed light on the impending technological changes. This modern transhumanist myth of an emergent UNICE is an attempt to peer over the event horizon to give us a peek at a possible future.

The Limits of Science

THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE

By Frank Vitale

At a recent meeting of the Illusion-of-Freewill Meetup group in Manhattan, the NewScientist Free will article of April 16th was passed around to the 8 people in attendance. That number of people, and the newly published article in New Scientist made me re-evaluate my impression that the free will debate had gone the way of Newton, into the distant past. I had lonely struggles with it in the 60s, 70s, and 80s and had stopped paying attention over 20 years ago. To my surprise and delight, I found that people are still struggling with and discussing the ancient dilemma.

 

The NewScientist article was interesting and informative, yet it contained within it an assumption that I want to challenge. The main focus of my article is to do that, but before I start, I want to give a brief description of the meeting, as it was lively, engaging and more interesting that I had expected.

One fellow had taken a bus from New Jersey and confessed that in the Port Authority he had gorged himself on pastries. He described himself as morbidly obese, as having Asperger’s syndrome (one of two in the group), as having thought insertions (schizoaffective disorder), OCD, as having a father who escaped Auschwitz and the fellow himself as a Mensa. He posed a question to the group. Was his gorging, which he admitted he knew was unhealthy, a product of his own free will or was his behavior determined and he had no control over it? I laughed and turned the question back on him, asking him what he thought. I was pleased when he answered that he might have been able to control himself. He gave his best honest answer, not a rationalization.

One person in the group said he knew deeply that his will was determined. I found that interesting because I feel just as deeply that I act of my own free will.

The leader of the group reasoned that if free will was an illusion, then deviants and criminals would be treated more humanely by society. The leader, the man from New Jersey and a couple of others in the group seemed to be coming at the free will perspective from an emotional perspective backed up by reasonable rational arguments.

But I, and a few others in the group approach the determinism dilemma more in terms of physical science.  And, though the article in NewScience focused on psychological experimentation, there was a fundamental scientific assumption that needs to be challenged.

The article seemed to assume that because neuroscience tells us so much about behavior, and that because neuroscience is making more and more headway every day, that eventually the brain/mind will be completely unraveled by science, that the neurological and chemical cause for every human behavior will be explained and potentially controlled, that the potential of science will be realized: human will will be demonstrated to be determined and free will an illusion. 

I am going to challenge this, but first I want you to know that I am not afraid of science, I am not jealous of science and I do not hate science. Like you, I want hard-nosed, unvarnished, unsentimental truth. I have a bachelors in physics. Discovering physics was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. I loved physics. I ate and drank it. I marveled at its power and I interpreted the world through it.

I believe, as Peter Medawar wrote, “…science is incomparably the most successful enterprise that human beings have ever engaged upon.” We are completely surrounded by the results of scientific advancement, our cars, our buildings, our computers, our phones, even our good health comes to us via science.

But soon after I discovered physics (in high school), fell in love with it, I saw something disturbing and confusing. Physics began telling me I had no free will. On the one had I knew I had free will, on the other science was telling me I didn’t.

I was locked in the determinism dilemma for 20 years. Though I had other fulfilling parts of my life, but that part, the philosophical struggle with determinism was lonely and despairing.

In the 80’s my perspective shifted slightly. I realized that while my science mind was telling me that I had no free will, there was another mind that was not as measurable and concrete as the science mind but that was just as powerful and important. It was telling me I had free will.

Erwin Schrodinger, Nobel laureate for his contributions to quantum mechanics, came to the same conclusion:

            “(i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature.

            (ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, by which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.” (What is Life?, p86)

What is important to come to terms with, what is difficult for us lovers of science, is that science has limits.  We tend to think of science as limitless, that because everything is made of molecules and because science can potentially tell us everything there is to know about molecules, that therefor science can tell us everything about the world and about existence. As another Nobel laureate in medicine and writer in the philosophy of science, Peter Mediwar, puts it, "...there is no limit upon the power of science to answer the kind of questions that science can answer." (The Limits of Science p60) 

However, in his little book, The Limits of Science, he points out that the, “propositions and observation statements of science have empirical furniture only,” (81) and that it is “logically outside the competence of science to answer questions to do with first and last things.” By this he means questions like, “How did everything begin? What are we here for? What is the point of living?” (66)

Karl Popper, the venerated philosopher of science, wrote, “It is important to realize that science does not make assertions about ultimate questions – about the riddles of existence, or about man’s task in this world. This has often been well understood. But some great scientists, and many lesser ones, have misunderstood the situation. The fact that science cannot make any pronouncement about ethical principles has been misinterpreted as indicating that there are no such principles while in fact the search for truth presupposes ethics.” Dialectica (32:342)

The human experience of free will is not “empiracle” and “is a riddle of existence,” and as such is outside the domain of science.

The mistake is often made that science tells us there is no God. This is a logical mistake that results from expecting too much from science. Science has no facility with which to see God because God is not subject to empirical observation, God is not physical or measurable. The inability of science to ‘see’ God should not be thought of as evidence that God does not exist. Science is structurally incapable of ‘seeing’ God. God is outside the domain if science.

And it is naive and, I think, intellectually dishonest, to think that everything that exists is in the domain of science. Everything about our humanness is outside the domain of science.  Our sense of self, love, faith, happiness and even our will, are not empirical and therefore outside the domain of science. Our humanness is not as concrete as the empirical world, but its existence is just as real.

Scientists and philosophers have been debating the determinism delimma for centuries and have not been able to resolve the conflict. It is time to accept the simple fact that our behavior is both free and determined. Centuries of debate have shown us that there is no other option.

I don’t mean to suggest that determinism and free will are compatable. They are contradictory. But I think we are asking the wrong question. It is not a question of wheter human actions are free or determined. The question should be, how can human actions be both free and determined?

In my enhanced eBook, The Metropolis Organism, I use words, images and video to look at cities from a scientific perspective. From this perspective humans are necessary but unremarkable organelle of a larger organism. From this perspective humans are things and do not have free will. (find out more at metropolisorganism.com)

But from another perspective, one which I have no better name for than the human perspective, humans do have free will. As with Schrodinger, I know this from my own direct experience.

The Good E-Reader

My enhanced eBook, The Metropolis Organism, was mentioned by The Good E-Reader's Mercy Pilkington in her report from the floor of BookExpo America:

MAY

27

The Rising Popularity of Enhanced E-books

By Mercy Pilkington

This year’s BookExpo America and IDPF Digital Book Conference brought exciting announcements in extremely opposite ends of the e-reader spectrum. On the one hand, two major players in the game unveiled to great fanfare and applause new versions of their e-reader devices that brought back the simplicity of reading by promoting a pared down version of a touch screen e-reader. Both Kobo and Barnes and Noble explained the focus behind their new e-ink e-readers, which was “just about reading a good book.”

On the flip side of e-reading, there was just as much excitement and discussion about enhanced e-books, which bring a veritable three-ring circus experience to reading. Enhanced e-books are the laser light show of books, with audio playback, embedded videos, and a cornucopia of photographs and graphics that just weren’t possible at the onset of digital publishing. Much of the discussion about the new features thatEPUB3 brings to the table surrounded its ability to have real-time audio and video tracking through media overlays, allowing the words to keep up with the page in order to improve the experience. Several large companies were proudly showing off demonstration stations of their improved voice-over for children’s books, to make it sound a little more like Grandpa reading to you and less like the voice at your local ATM machine.

One of the great things about this trend in digital publishing is that the suppliers are obviously listening to the likes and dislikes of their reading audience. Google E-books’ statistic that there are a growing number of readers who own both a dedicated e-reader as well as a tablet PC indicates that sometimes a reader just wants to enjoy words on the page and there are other times when he wants to be immersed in a complete experience.

Blio, whose company tagline is, “Reading way beyond the book,” was one such enhanced e-book company that had set up an entirely interactive station at the BookExpo for readers to sample enhanced e-books and the ease of navigation of its cloud-based reading concept.

Readers aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit from the entertainment and informational values of enhanced e-books. Indie authors with enough computer skills are finding a lot of satisfaction in developing their own enhanced e-books and self-publishing them. Previously, tablet PCs were pretty much the only platform that could handle the intense graphics levels and video embeds that made reading and writing the book such an experience, but with EPUB3’s launch more and more devices will be able to handle the workload.

Frank Vitale, self-published author of The Metropolis Organism, which is available for purchase through PayPal’s file sharing platform PayLoadz, had a lot of fun creating his book about the idea of a city as a living organism. It’s a manuscript he took a lot of pride in, but from the beginning he realized that his goal for the final product of this book was going to be so photo-heavy that it would be impossible to publish it traditionally and still make it available at a price-point that readers would be willing to spend on a single book. He drew on his experience in filmmaking (Montreal Main) and developed the project as an enhanced e-book; it now contains eleven videos and over 200 color graphics and photos.

“Photo books are expensive for the publisher to make,” comments Vitale, “but e-books aren’t. The cost for enhanced e-books will be less for everyone, the author, the reader, and the publisher.” Vitale’s next project is a photo essay book on the GAGA Art Complex, a book that would have been relegated to the realm of aesthetically pleasing (and expensive) coffee table books, a market without a high consumer base; now, as an enhanced e-book the likelihood that more readers will participate in the book is much greater.

http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/the-rising-popularity-of-enhanced-e-books/#disqus_thread

The Metropolis Organism book launch a huge success

photo: potanovic.com

My enhanced eBook, The Metropolis Organism, was launched at the GAGA Arts Center, Garnerville, New York.
The space, designed by Rebecca Moynihan of Hans Events and PR, was elegant, a remark made by many of the over one hundred people in attendance.
The presentation went well and I was very please by the questions asked, showing that many people have thoughts along the same lines as I do.

photo: potanovic.com

A cake in the shape of a book created by Denise Brynes was a big hit. It was so convincing that someone flipped off the cover thinking that it was a real book. It was that realistic AND delicious. If you need a great cake made contact Denise at DenByrnes@aol.com.


The Metropolis Organism is an enhanced eBook, that is, it is an electronic book that you read on your computer and it has 11 videos and a animated living cover. If you want further information about the book or to download go to metropolisorganism.com.


I want to thank everyone who came and helped to make it a spectacular evening.

photo: potanovic.com

The Metropolis Organism III - growth of Baltimore from 1792 to 1992

Metropolis Organism growth - Las Vegas 1983 to 2007

The Metropolis Organism - film - 1974

The Metropolis Organism, B&W film made in 1974. It looks at earth and cities from the perspective of a distant interstellar scientist. The narrator is a conceptual professor lecturing his class on the discovery of a new organism: The Metropolis Organism.