Working with Reading ↔ Making brief as a group experimenting with how we create a dialogue between our selected texts which are from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Styles, and The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan led us to produce an A5 publication called “Cities in Style”.

City in Style is an experimental book that explores the idea of “a style being the message”. That is done by examining Italo Calvino’s narratives of Marco Polo’s exploration journeys in Invisible Cities through the lenses of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Styles. The book applies Marshall McLuhan’s theory of “the medium is the message” from The Medium is the Massage. Cities in Style investigate different writing styles and communication patterns acting as a medium with the relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.

The book consists of 3 cities divided and translated into three different styles: Notation (original text), Official letter, Hesitation and Logical Analysis. In the newly created book Cities in Style, the style becomes the medium that affects our understanding of the message.