That was a period of investigating these systems instead of just talking about them. On a MOO you usually don't have so much "substantial" conversation that's going on. It's more like one-liners and pieces. It is much more interesting to look at the social dynamics, and how the way people position themselves discursively affects their surroundings, including the way people interact with them. How they formulate their gender and their physical appearance for example. There is a lot of substantial work that's being done, but it's much more performative than a discussion in a mailbox. You can't just talk about it, you have to do it.

 That's a bit abstract. Could you give an example of what was going on in this MOO?

It's like a play where you are one of the characters. You have lines of text on your screen that describe what the people in the MOO are doing, like "this person laughs", "this person waves his arms", "this person says this and that". And than you have description of the enviroment, so it is as if you were in a film script and all the characters, who are logged in from different places, are generating their own part in real time.

 This sounds like a form of happening, except that in Sixties-type happenings the artist would create a situation to which people would react, while a MOO is only a platform without any stipulations. I have the impression that the things that were going on there were a collective process that might as well have taken place without the intervention of an artist...

No, because you can program in very specific kinds of experiences in a MOO, and you can restrict or augment the ways that people move around and how they appear. For instance, "Shark" programmed a piece called "The Sensous Sea", where you dive into a wall of water and explore this underwater world. It's all textually mediated, you type in commands to go in certain directions, and experience different kind of things. Another character had a "Transport Cube" that you could enter and that took you to different parts of the MOO. Another work involved these virtual garments that would change the way other people on the MOO would see you. You can program an enviroment to morph or change its conditions. In one work, when you entered the room, it completely abstracted your speech. So you are talking gibberish and can't make any sense.

 Did you show this in a gallery?

We first built a Blast office and a gallery on the PMC-MOO as part of the Sandra Gering Gallery in New York for "Blast4: Bioinformatica" in 1994. We used the gallery as a way of presenting finished projects, and the office to invite people for various discussions. There were correspondences between the physical gallery space and the MOO gallery space. For example somebody would develop a project where portions of it would be printed material and portions would be online. Or it might have existed totally on the MOO. We had a live interface projected on the gallery wall, and a computer station, so you could speak back and forth. The people from the physical gallery logged on as a character called "collective subject". Some of the people on the MOO would realize that this character was actually an agency that was filled with people that were in a physical space elsewhere. This window between the physical gallery and the MOO was always open. There was a lot of communication going back and forth. Sometimes there were great correspondences and lots of cross-over, and sometimes the conditions were so different that there was no communication at all. Some of the people who were on the MOO came to the physical gallery. It became a very famous show among MOO people. Families came in who had a life on the MOO in addition to their normal family life. Since the World Wide Web has taken off, MOOs don't get talked about so much anymore. But they are fascinating to explore, because they are social spaces. People embody themselves, and they are working with bodily forms, and they invent new genders and new kinds of relationships. MOOs are a very important part of the internet.

 Could the same thing have been done on IRC?

No, because those Chats are much more disembodied. The great thing about the MOO is that the focus is on creating an embodied persona, not just being a talking head. And you actually create a spatial community with programmed objects.

 This MOO seems to be at a stand-still now. I looked at it a couple of days ago, and there is nothing happening anymore...

The next step in taking these communities to a new level is to create much more visual or three- dimensional environments, for example in VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language). But these social VRML-enviroments are really strange. For me it's hard to have a discussion with, like, a talking spoon. It's too much like a computer game.

 Do you feel that it is important for your work, that the things you do online have a connection to a physical space?

Yeah, absolutely. I see the internet as a network of materializing vectors. It is really involved with creating new material forms and refiguring existing forms. People talk about disembodiment on the net, and I really don't know what they mean. For me it is very embodying. I like to watch how technological paces affect daily rhythms and routines. People have all these little gadgets. The documenta team, for instance, all have these mobile phones. They are constantly communicating, and sometimes you can't have an uninterrupted conversation for five minutes. As soon as someone's phone rings, everybody jumps at once, thinking it's for them. These are some of the technological rhythms that affect the way we move, they way we structure space, situate our bodies, conduct our relationships. These kind of paces and activities are embedded in technological systems, and they are part of a larger apparatus.

 In your piece here at documenta the technology consists of a number of video beamers that project light on the walls, with small mirrors that reflect the light. Is that the technological apparatus you are talking about?

Well, that's the hardware, but it refers to larger systems. I am seeing it in a larger sense, in a sense of technologies of representation, that initiate and encode certain kind of activities.

 You've been standing in this room for two days now. Can you say how this environment affects people's movements through the room?

I was curious to know how it would be activated by groups of people. A lot of times you find that people move about certain spaces in a predictable way. Here it is very different. Some visitors have said that it is like a public square. I was really happy about that.

 There are these flickering interferences between the different light sources that strike me as very "techno". Do you think that most people have grown accustomed to this kind of "virtual light"?

I don't know. I'm comfortable in here. This is a lot about technological modifications that are almost surgical. I don't really see them as alienating, because they have become a part of daily life so much already. But I wanted to resist a visual overload, and instead concentrate on movement and orientation.

 There is this cordless mouse with which you can manouver yourself through a VRML-space projected on one of the walls. Is this a way of opening this physical space up to the "virtual space" of the internet?

The VRML-site is dis-spaced, rendered. I wanted to generate a sense of space that is cross-formated, that is multiplicitous and unresolved.

 What strikes me about these VRML spaces is that they are completely based on the Renaissance perspective. Wherever you look in these enviroments you always end up staring at the focal point...

Yes, that's the problem with some VRML. I am actually working with the renaissance perspective here by making references to traditional kinds of wall paintings. You have the choice wether to illusionistically extend the space, or to call attention to the space as representation. The location of the viewpoint was a very political issue. Entire communities were mobilized around the question where to locate the viewpoint. The mirrored adjustment units in this environment are references to the multiplicity of the visual orientations of the viewer.

 Is the web site on the documenta-Server an extension of this physical space or a work in its own right?

Both. On the website you are flipped back and forth between space and figuration through the agency of the "rhythmic fittings." There is also a book that has these figurations. These figurations are psychological mechanisms. There are patterns of activities that are artifacted. You cannot see them here. What I hope to do with this is to show how these patterns and rhythms affect our everyday life. Our language is increasingly incorporating this kind of technological pace. In a recent interview in "Working Mother" magazine, this woman was talking about "maximizing downtime". It's like an excercise manual. Things that people do over and over again are increasingly annexed to the paces of technological systems. You can see it as a technological calculus. When you relate the things, that you do over and over again, to code structures you see certain relationships that I want to explore. It is a way of creating awareness and resistance, because these are vectors of very powerful mechanisms for producing a certain kind of behaviour in you.