In the 20th century the best candidate for the capital city of Earth would have been New York. In the wake of the second world war, as the capitals of Europe lay in ruins and the incipient giants of Asia and Africa were yet to surpass those of the West, New York was pre-eminent in exactly the way a city must be: in its mythmaking. There was something Cartesian about it, about the way it was exemplified by a smaller homunculus version of itself, contained within itself: Manhattan. Historically, aggressive zoning regulation effectively turned the skyline into a collaborative art project. Any coherent vision, or coherent architectural movements, degenerated by the 1970s into a mishmash whose aesthetic underpinnings were that of capital’s inscrutable logic. The edges and corners of ‘international style’ skyscrapers bullied red brick residential buildings and the ancient excesses of the 1930s Art Deco monuments, and the pockmarked roads sewed these to blocks of dismal ant boxes not partaking in any sort of style at all.
Across this anachronism of concrete and glass and steel, American commerce produced epic montages of advertising that bombarded people with incoherent messaging. The graffiti that popped up in places where the authorities could not stamp it out added further to the noise: alienated voices providing subtitles for the underlying sickness behind the smiling faces on the billboards. The iconography of modern graffiti began in the 1970s in New York’s subway system; and graffiti’s appropriation of commercial and public surfaces as impromptu canvasses constituted a modular treatment of art in relation to the surface it lived on (canvas, building, billboard, train) such that the surface of the city—the city as surface—became eminently legible to artists and thinkers. By the 1990s graffiti was everywhere, but it was also palpably aged. There is no better representation of New York in this time than the post-apocalyptic treatment it receives in the music video for Mobb Deep’s Shook Ones, Part II. A spidery piano sample, stretched and hollowed out, creeps out from under skeletal drums. Everywhere is cold and it’s night, or nearly so, all the time. Nothing looks like it can last much longer; everything was born already ancient—“I’m only nineteen, but my mind is old”. The boiling hot radicalism of disco rap and bebop are gone, but their ghosts remain, see-through. The only truly opaque substance to be found is Platonic surface. In Spider-Man 2, the cheaply produced movie tie-in game from 2004, New York is rendered as nothing but surface.
When one boots up Spider-Man 2 for the first time one is given a choice between two distinct control modes—“Easy swinging: one-button swing and release with automatic swing jumping” and “Manual swinging: full manual control for maximum precision.” There is no point in playing the game unless one picks manual swinging. Buildings look hideous: lighting is dim, polygons are few and jagged, and textures are muddy and indistinct. Windows are empty and dull or glowing with a creepy undifferentiated matte yellow that is supposed to tell us that people are alive within the walls—we know they’re not. But these cuboids are affordances; things we can swing from. They enable us to soar through the air with all the dynamism of the Spider-Man of the comics and the movies, but they also wall us in; the space for swinging is in the grooves between buildings. They contain us. Occasionally we will swing between districts and some text will flash up on screen that tells us that we are somewhere that feels New York-ish. You are in the “lower east side”, Spider-Man. Occasionally we will swing up and out, over the top of a sky-scraper, and briefly see an indistinct green rectangle that must be Central Park. In theory one can become inside certain buildings in certain contexts, but only when the game needs to dispossess us of our swinging; we never really consent to it. We can become inside a building, but buildings can never truly be entered into. It doesn’t feel like the translation of a body through a space, or even much like waking up from a dream. It feels more like waking up in a brand new body grown in a vat to contain your consciousness; unconscious of how far away you now are from where you were, but knowing that your last body has been discarded as hazardous waste, and that any future change of scenery will see your present body added to the same bin. This is the texture of Spider-Man 2’s New York. It's a Potemkin city that somehow contains you, and contains you, and contains you.
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