Any city should be described by a number of different maps, depending on what you want to know. This city, Shift City, is described by three maps; maps of things that stand still, maps of things that move, and maps of things that exist only in the minds of people that live there. These things, received in fragments, add up to form a living city. The shape of a city at a single moment is a freeze-frame, a snapshot, of that city's ongoing transformation. No longer does a building, or a photograph of a building, exist in isolation, as an object of contemplation; it becomes a single object lost in a sea of images, interwoven with words sometimes indistinguishable from the images themselves. This moment contains within itself the ruins of every previous moment, the archaic usages, the forgotten expressions that have lost all meaning except as a faint twinge in the minds of those who live in that place and remember that phrase -- or, in a city, that building, that alley, that shape of the skyline -- from their childhood. Out of fragments of information arises a new context, a new place; the city of transformation. wait here for shift city . . .