Cities are immensely complicated leviathans; composed of many bodies each one of which contains an immensly complex brain, filled with spaces where those brains reside and interact. They are not just composed of vast crowds of people, plants and animals, they are material and abstract structures, filled with heated spaces and connected vascules that make possible a new kind of life.

These Leviathans are new arrivals - even compared to the longevity of human life they occupy a short time half way to the last ice age, and since then they have inexorable grown over much of the land mass of the planet. Their existence makes possible swollen populations of people whose lives teem and swirl within and around the mass of hardened structures. Earth and stone have been transmuted into vast interrelated complexes so that the land is covered, sometimes for miles, in a honeycombed encrustation resembling gigantic lichen.

Around them the land also is changed, stripped of much of its forest, it is divided into a pattern of fields and filled with mono crops of vegetation and large herds of animals. Gradually, the wild places are being lost as the successful newcomers tighten their grip on the richer places of the planet.

What are they, these newcomers to the blue planet. How are we to view them? We, who are them, who are made by them, find it difficult to say. They are what we are, we are what they are. Only an act of the imagination can free us from our own phenomena and look down on it, as it were, from a great height.

This exhibition and accompanying text attempts to do just that. It takes a long view. It takes a scalpal and removes the encrustations of the city like scratching the structure off an ants nest, and watches with astonishment at the mass of scurrying dots of life who stream in all directions with their little packages of possessions or their offspring clasped to their bodies. It examines the intricate vascules embedded in the membranes flowing with liquids, electrons and trolleys. It listens in on the quicksilver complexity of sounds and detects a nervous system that connects mind to mind, and mind to past minds, and minds to future minds.

This is not a comfortable exhibition. It does not set out to confirm any prejudices. It does not interest itself in individual human emotion, or thought. It does not attempt to be beautiful or poetic. It considers the leviathan to be a vast and frightening new life form whose values and virtues all too often do not correspond with those of its inhabitants. It sees a creature who may be at a primitive stage of development (just as the early multi cellular creatures had far less inner complexity than the incredible eukariote cells who made them possible), blustering dangerously in a delicate ecosystem.

It sees the leviathan as a parasite, a dangerous new virulence, pestilential to the planet. It is something that must be stopped before it is too late. The leviathan must change. It must become intelligent before it is too late, it must develop sensitivity overnight, it must become a poet, an artist, a philosopher, a seer, a thinking feeling sentient being. Cities must be changed from the inside. A new revolution is needed, the cities need to find their souls.