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The Arcades Project responded to Walter Benjamin’s dissatisfaction with the form of the closed “work” and its requirements of unity, linearity, and autonomy. This unfinished project became a place to experiment with an open language that could already be defined as hypertextual, as the object of study itself requires: the metropolis as an expressive and communicative platform implies a reinvention of the method. The German thinker’s gaze shattered the rules of academic tradition by taking on that of the medium, destroying the naturalist perspective through the photographic extension of the eye. The medial properties of photography become a lens and a diaphragm for the researcher, a lateral and porous gaze on the multiplicity of the metropolis, an opening to the recording of difference, a new way of experiencing and thinking about reality.