Page after page, page upon page, snippets of urban signage and people among them, sometimes interacting with them, in bright, glossy, electric, neon light-like glow go by. It's stimulating and confusing--it's supposed to be. The design of the book--the postmodern art form par excellence of collage--is a refrain of contemporary urban life which has become more or less the same around the world.
The snippets on any page of facing collages could be could be--and are--from major cities around the world--Tokyo, Mumbai, Mexico City, New York, Paris. Except for the language or the ethnicity of the persons, it's hard to tell the apart--which is the point. The multitudes, multifarious signs of the times all blend into one colorful, throbbing, but homogenous style. The postmodern time of fragmentation, popular culture, global commerce, and technological gadgetry is apparent in all signs.
For Sadin, the signs are not just literal as in advertising or store names along a block; but are individuals too as they interact with their cell phones, sport T-shirts with logos, or navigate their way through the cornucopia of commercial signs. Many of the images are numbered, with Sadin's comment on what it says about contemporary life in the vicinity; though not as an adjacent caption as this would go against the design to reflect randomness and spontaneity. A side of a building in Tokyo exemplifies an "information facade [which is] a large readable space" becoming more familiar in cities elsewhere. One "luminous information device" in Osaka is the size of a five-story building. An observation Sadin makes regarding one image is how a group of persons is dwarfed by the outsized advertising displays they are standing next to. Global telecommunications, the ambiguity of social involvement or individual isolation posed by groups of persons all using their cell phones, and changes in behavior and psychology wrought by the pervasive signs and the technology bringing them are other themes. In a couple of short all-text sections, Sadin synthesizes and expands on the short comments he makes scattered among the images. Sadin puts on exhibitions, lectures, teaches, and writes on how media and technology are rapidly and ineluctably changing the urban environment.
