"The City of Babble" by Samuel Joseph 
  

The City of Babble comprises a bricolage of various American cities transposed upon a model of the Tower of Babel. This is not the American city in its most commonly perceived reality, but a monumentalization or crystallization of both contemporary and past realities and fantasies as explored through kit bashing or memetic reproduction, a city defined by technobabble, the commodified aesthetics of "wokeness," the creative commons, and other appropriations allowed under the header of "open-source architecture." Think American propaganda for a pastoral past that never really existed meets deep fried memes. This capitalist image of the city, retail, and marketing stands as a totem to the economic, social, political, transportive, and cultural realities and fantasies of a globalized and transnationalized history-rather, it infuses these realities and fantasies with a kind of concrete materialism that emphasizes the city's component "thingness" and the agency of those "things" that compose the city.