ABSTRACT

This article considers the place of Le città invisibili within the debate on cybernetics, both as a product of its time as well as a harbinger of the future advent of network culture. It proposes to interpret the two most emblematic images of the book – the enchanted palace of the Kublai Khan, and the everchanging ‘invisible cities’ visited by Marco Polo – as Calvino’s personal contribution to the definition of cybertext and cyberspace. Curiously, the same emblematic images are also found in the work of two of Calvino’s contemporaries: the American pioneer of information technology Ted Nelson, and the Japanese architect and exponent of the Metabolist movement Arata Isozaki. Through a comparative analysis, this article shows how the new concept of information brought by cybernetics crystallised in virtually identical images and metaphors across disciplines and cultures: in literature, with Calvino, in computer science with Nelson, and in architecture with Isozaki.

摘要

本文探讨了Le città invisibili的地位在关于控制论的争论中，它既是时代的产物，也是网络文化未来出现的预兆。它建议将书中最具代表性的两个图像——忽必烈的迷人宫殿和马可波罗访问过的不断变化的“看不见的城市”——解释为卡尔维诺对网络文本和网络空间定义的个人贡献。奇怪的是，在卡尔维诺的两位同时代人的作品中也发现了同样的象征性图像：美国信息技术先驱泰德·尼尔森和日本建筑师和新陈代谢运动的倡导者矶崎新。通过比较分析，本文展示了控制论带来的新信息概念如何在跨学科和文化中以几乎相同的图像和隐喻具体化：在文学中，卡尔维诺，