Imaginary Cities*

This was on boingboing, but I didn't know that until after I found it in another blog. It's a film about an autistic young man who has drawn an imaginary city called Urville. I love imaginary landscapes. The maps in Lord of the Rings, for example. There is something science fictional about it, the meticulous construction of a world.

I find A.G. Rizzoli's work to have some of the same appeal. He didn't draw cities, but instead drew buildings which he apparently saw a psychological portraits of people. But he also drew an 'exposition', a kind of world's fair, that he called Y.T.T.E. or Yield to Total Elation. It was full of extraordinarily huge buildings, including The Shaft of Ascension, "in which Euthanasia is available to those desiring and meriting a pleasant painless bon voyage from this land."

I don't world build anymore. It's a different kind of narrative for me. When I was in high school I used to draw maps of archipeligos--strongs of islands with careful topographical lines showing the elevations and rivers that cascaded into waterfalls (the topographical lines clustering at the point where the river went over the edge.) There is something wonderful about this kind of static world.

*with a nod toward's Ben Rosenbaum's book of the same name.