This is a road at night seen from an overpass. In the left lanes, orange and blue-white lines pile up in layers and flow, while in the right lanes only a few thin red strands remain. The median strip lies there like an insulating layer dividing the two flows, and beyond it the wires spread out from a utility pole like the ribs of a fan. Shop signs and the red dots of traffic lights are marked in the darkness like contact points.
Not a single car is visible in this photograph. While the shutter was open, the individual vehicles disappeared and only the flow remained. The way we understand the city is shifting in much the same direction. Accumulated trails rather than a single car, patterns over time rather than a single trip, are used as the material for reading the city.
The thickness and density of the lines tell us what was needed at that hour. One side is thick and the other sparse. Where more power should be sent, at which junction a charger should be installed, when signal cycles should be slowed, all of it is worked out by examining this asymmetry.
Below the railing of the overpass, on a steel plate with its paint peeling, tape marks remain at four corners where someone put up a flyer and tore it down. The white solid line in the lane beside it has been repainted for one stretch only, so its color is unusually bright. Apart from the gaze that tries to read the flow, this bridge is maintained through the repeated work of putting up, tearing off, and painting again by hand. Even as the trails became a diagram, someone set up a ladder and picked up a brush.
The wires were drawn by a designer, but no one designed the lines on the asphalt. Thousands of individual choices gathered into a single wiring diagram, and that diagram is erased and drawn again every night. Looking at the photograph again, the night when one of those lines was one's own is flowing there together.
