“Suppose you think of an organism as being like a computer graphic that is generated from some program. Or think of an oak tree as being the output of a program that was contained inside the acorn. The genetic program is in the DNA molecule. Instead of calling it software like a computer program, we call it wetware because it’s in a biological cell where everything is wet. Your software is the abstract information pattern behind your genetic code, but your actual wetware is the physical DNA in a cell.”

Rudy Rucker, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu, eds., The Mondo 2000 User’s Guide.

In his images of Landcuts (comprising the interrelated series The City, Downtown and The Suburb), Paul-Émile Rioux is ­creating a brave new metamorphic world of habitat and ­inhabitation for the twenty-first century. Indeed, Rioux broaches a ­powerful critique even as he builds future worlds of tiered signs that may seem purely utopian and exhilarating on first viewing but which may in fact be profoundly dystopian. As we stand on the threshold of these landcuts, they lay a cunning trap for us. We are seduced into projecting within their infinity grids. We perceive them as harbingers of total colonization, and it is not long before we are submersed and swept away into uncharted depths.