How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome
How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome as a neo-classical web site. It pieces together fragments of history, poetry, video, photography and cartography collected during an extended stay in Rome. It reflects upon certain gaps - between the fragment and the whole, between the local and the tourist, between what is known of history and what is speculative. As the web ages its landscape becomes increasingly laden with allegory and artefact. The accumulation and continuous re-mapping of data results in the establishment of a muddled symbolic visual language, a composite of various canons of web aesthetic. Just as in Rome three thousand years of continuous occupation have produced one of the most deeply stratified and complex urban sites in existence, How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome fuses together fragments from the history of web programming and imaging technologies, from the most basic HTML to advanced DHTML scripting. Visually the site is a pastiche of styles spanning from the schematic mode of cartography to the edited mode of digital photography and Quicktime video. Textually the site mixes my own written voice with quotations from many generations of travelers to Rome. The result is a highly subjective quasi-fictional intertextual dialogue that is often contradictory and quite funny. Technically speaking, I recycle bits and pieces of existing Web technology to echo the stratified condition of my subject matter. In this investigation of dislocation, romanticism, and the fragmentary nature of language in the modern, corrupt, confusing, ruin-strewn and tourist-thronged city of Rome, the only way I found to present a comprehensive visual and textual narrative was by embracing contradictions.
How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome was created in Rome with the support of Barbara Catalani, and in Montreal with the financial support of the OBORO New Media Lab artist in residency program and a Development Grant from the Conseil des art et des lettres du Quebec. In June 2005 How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome was included in the New Geographies Project in Mexico City. In April 2006 it was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, in association with the 19th Annual imagesFestival. How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome was also named a Web Art Finalist in the Drunken Boat PanLiterary Awards 2006.