Ars Electronica 1997, Exhibition Catalogue

"Is there a way for us to define ourselves and the space in which we dwell, when the city is increasingly referenced as a space ofdisappearance, a space of the future but not of the present, a space of anxiety and loss ?" M. Christine Boyer

In a 1995 article, appeared in "Le Monde Diplomatique", the French theorist of technology, Paul Virilio, describes the phenomenon of the "loss of orientation" experienced by the exponentially increasing crowd which is relentlessly enthralled in cyberspace. Virilio observes that the construction of information superhighways, which are globalized and instantaneously updated, presents us with a threat, a menace to our perception of what reality is, of what it means for us to exist, as individuals, here and now. Induced by the splitting of the sensible world into real and virtual in parallel with the "invention of the perspective of real-time", this threat causes a shock, a "mental concussion", that hooks the happenings of events to a globalized monorail track. We have extended Virilio's concern to the varied world of the Net, we have lost our bearings in the flatland of data offrered by our "regular" browser, and experienced information anxiety as a shock caused by the vast unstructured landscape under the infinite horizon of the World Wide Web. As "spacemakers" [Walser, 1990], we have therefore undertaken the task to "escape flatland" [Tufte, 1990], to design an information browser that organizes information as it fetches it, in real-time, in a virtual three-dimensional space which anchors our perceptual flow of data to a cognitive map of a (virtual) place. This place is a city...

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