That sounds appealing in a sinister techno way, doesn’t it? Like the title of some prophetic-future-past cyberpunk novel — let’s say, by my favorite author in the genre, Hua Ruisi*.

A hypersurface is a manifold or an algebraic variety of dimension n − 1, which is embedded in an ambient space of dimension n, generally a Euclidean space, an affine space or a projective space. Hypersurfaces share, with surfaces in a three-dimensional space, the property of being defined by a single implicit equation, at least locally (near every point), and sometimes globally. (Wikipedia, “Hypersurface” <link>)

Of course, these images have nothing except the most symbolic and superficial resemblance in common with the mathematical notion. When I was in architecture school, the would-be starchitects running the show liked to throw technical terms like that around when discussing their projects — as if any of them was capable of “mathing” their way out of a paper bag. I suppose that I’m doing the same thing here, having learned my lessons well.

In fact, these are simply photo-series that I casually captured with my smartphone on the “limousine” bus ride from Narita to Tokyo. My friend Takesh had convinced me that the JR Narita Express, which would deposit jetlagged me in the midst of Shinjuku Station at rush hour, was a bad idea. So why not ride the slower, slightly more expensive limo bus, direct to the Hilton? It wasn’t until quite a bit later in the evening that I began to appreciate the reflection-addled aesthetics of these GIF files, with the setting sun and the Tokyo Skytree — and later the glowing Tokyo Tower — behind an endless foreground of road-and-city-scape.

*Hua Ruisi 华锐思 is me. Or rather, the name assigned to me when I studied Mandarin. Think of Hua as my cooler alter ego — who became a science fiction writer so unworldly and cryptic that no one would read him, as opposed to an architect so unworldly and trite that no one would build him.