The Shadow Architecture at the Crossroads Annual 19X

Notes

Artist's book. CNC, New York, 1988. Quarto, 228 pages, illustrated throughout in black and white. The book reports a single year of life and news at "the Crossroads", an invented city sitting at the centre of a vast continental railway system through which, as the opening section has it, everyone travelling must pass and be counted. It is built as a mosaic: hundreds of fragments — diagrams, notices, typewriter text, halftone panels — assembled so that the collecting and reordering of cultural debris becomes the structure of the narrative rather than its decoration. The cover states the method plainly, running a small house-and-cloud scene through four steps of coarsening halftone dots until the image dissolves into pattern. Why it is in a computer-art collection: Zelevansky belongs to the roster for SWALLOWS (1985–86), a "literary videogame" he wrote in Forth-79 for the Apple II and issued on a 5.25-inch floppy, subtitled "electronic mythology for an audience of one" — an early piece of interactive, computational literature. Shadow Architecture is the print side of the same practice, a book-length argument about assembling meaning from fragments under a system of rules, made two years after the program. Found by the collection's own hunt feed as an eBay listing, tracked under computer art.