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City Life
is a flash animation named after the Steve Reich (b. 1936) composition of the same title (Nonesuch 1996).
The artwork was intended for an early digital video billboard on the M4 corridor into London UK, operated by Maiden Outdoor. The work’s only direct reference to the Reich composition is the title.
Only fragments of the source material survive from which the images in the present catalogue raisonné have been derived. The bulk of the work has been lost to digital obsolescence of the authoring platform.
Images include cityscapes from Southeast Asian mega cities, and plan views of those cities’ street grids. Elements of the grid are rendered as black or coloured blocks and overlaid onto the cityscapes. The grids also act as an organising visual element for the artwork’s texts.
The extant text is fragmentary but indicates the subject matter of the work: the way cities marshal life into blocks or chunks and the fleetingness of all lived experience:
Great chunks of life hull away, fall back as noted experience. / Our manufactured lives. / Our invented, made-up lives. / Whole prairies of your life can have passed you by.
