In "CITYalias," Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber's representational software queries the potentials and constraints of architecture, urbanism and new digital technologies in generating social and cultural space. Their deployment of digitizing devices and internet software intervenes in the technological and consumer-oriented logics of globalization and urban planning. Out of their attention to the ideological motivation and representation of social housing projects, Bitter and Weber critically explore the instrumental rationalities used to judge architecture and urban design based on formalism. Unaccounted in this aestheticized logic are the social, economic and political contingencies that have curtailed the full realization of affordable, accessible and livable housing. In order to bring attention to the limits and disparities of this acontextual reasoning, "CITYalias" speculates on the effects of these positivist logics of architecture, technology and planning. To accomplish this, Bitter and Weber's cultural software utilizes image and text to generate a critical agency. They mobilize notions of source code both technically and metaphorically rather than leaving the potential for agency only in realm of the digital. As an analysis of the built environment and method for conducting critical interventions, "image.source" is a visual and textual composite of the social, economic, political and cultural forces at play in the planning, materialization and ongoing debates of the necessity for social housing. This work consists of four aerial photographs of the Bijlmer, Amsterdam's famous housing project from the sixties, digitized through ASCII text code (American Standard Code for Information Interchange: US-Standard-Code (7 Bit)). Rather than using random text characters to generate the range of grey tones that comprise the image as most ASCII programs do, Bitter and Weber alter this software to construct their images from four contending, yet influential statements on the benefits and disparities wrought through urbanization. The text both structures and is embedded in the image. Upon close inspection of the image's detail, one is able to read these source texts that range from Rem Koolhaas's treatise "The Generic City," to a report by Walter Gropius from the 1929 CIAM conference. Texts by Mike Davis and Saskia Sassen account for the detrimental effects on society by the global redeployments of capital, labour and technology. These disparate texts drawn from specific locales, historical perspectives and ideological stances constitute the material form of the photographic image as well as the discursive logics at play in the formation, maintenance and transformation of social space. Instrumentalized approaches to representation where the image is used to merely reflect or legitimize contentious social realities are undermined. In "image.source," Bitter and Weber construct a document that illuminates the complex, contingent and cross-cutting relationship between representation and the real. They challenge the aesthetic logics that treat cityscape photography as arbitrary documents that can be used to represent any aspect of urbanism. "Image.source" then is a critic on the vicarious interpretation of urban photography. As in many of their projects, they are interested in utilizing what some consider are redundant or low technologies. ASCII code is understood as surpassed by more complicated graphics software. Nevertheless, ASCII is integral to "CITYalias" as it is a simple, easily used source code that requires relatively little bandwidth and can work on even the most elementary of computers. ASCII also affords Bitter and Weber the ability to adapt digital imaging to suit purposes that are not so easily achieved through photography and more analogic print media. Their use of ASCII code allows for the illumination of the fraught and mutually constituting relationships between image and source, text and context, the built environment and an array of competing interests, institutions and discourses. These relationships are best characterized by Bitter and Weber's approach to figure and ground. Through digitization, depth and perspective are flattened, allowing for a visual regime that shifts back and forth between the most specific details of the textual code to the broadest overview – the aerial vantages of the Bijlmer. As a result, the resolution of "image.source" appears opalescent and creates a spatially and semantically multifaceted translucence rather than a fixed and receding perspective. While "image.source" uses digitalization as an opportunity to look at the mutually constitutive relationship between text and context, the built environment and an array of conjunctural forces, it in effect disrupts instrumental rationalities that represent the social as a series of transparent, and self-evident truths. In "almere.txt" (Bitter and Weber's collaboration with Jeff Derksen), the positivist logic of what they call the textual bias is pushed to its extreme. Here a multitude of photos of family housing from Almere are arranged in rows as if they were text on a page. Appearing as icons representing the various architectural typologies of this privatized development, they are repeated, stacked and rearranged from line to line. In the process of morphing and transformation, the images of the Almere dwellings come to resemble the very social housing blocks and high rises they were to be a counterpoint to. This interface of antithetically situated typologies of the for-profit single-family dwelling and the communal high rise– appear in a formal continuum– dislocating the source of ideological conflict and social contradiction as intrinsic of physical architectural form and its image. To situate this displacement, several theoretical aphorisms are interspersed amongst the rows of text-dwellings. These propositions operate perhaps as the source code for "almere.txt's" problematic. They suggest that Bitter, Weber and Derksen's representational interventions are iterative and performative and engage with the social as it is shaped through repetition and reiteration over time. As noted in "almere.txt," in the cultural software of "CITYalias", architecture is conceptualized as "the repetition of regulatory forms which materialize sites and citizens." In attending to the shifting and cross-cutting relationship between visual, textual, architectural, economic, technological, and urban formations, "CITYalias" analyzes the constitution of socio-cultural space while offering a method for approaching critical analysis and intervention in their logics. In "CITYalias," the digitization process foregrounds the visual and semantic meanings and forms that are mutually structuring, rather than producing transparent and self-evident truths which obscure or legitimize neoliberal strategies. Nancy Shaw, Vancouver 2000 this article is also published in the print magazine EIKON in Oct 2000	.