Martin Wattenberg: The WonderWalker, to me, is a way of using collections to communicate. I found that in working with Marek on the project, we would often have conversations conducted by placing icons and web pages on the map. Rather than talking by e-mail or phone, we’d talk using icons and links. I think that pre-museum collections often work this way: they are designed to communicate information using the collected objects as vocabulary.

Marek Walczak: You have Peter the Great, travelling in Europe in the 17th century, picking up all kinds of curiosities, coming back to St. Petersburg and dumping them in a palace. Then he imports European intellectuals to start his first university, most of whom were in their 20s. The grafting of a new system of ideas onto an ancient culture, it’s a bit like the internet!

Steve: What have you learned about the history of wunderkammer, memory palaces, cabinets of curiosity and their ilk in the course of creating the WonderWalker?

Marek: Memory palaces, as written up by Francis Yates' The Art of Memory and in Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, created equivalencies between ideas and imagined spaces. Their purpose was to retain a large “world” of thought prior to cheap printing and paper. A world of common thought shared by individuals. At a certain point, I guess, the contents of intellectual thought exceeded even the memory systems devised to hold them, and as hierarchical methods of knowledge took over, it was no longer necessary to hold “everything.” You could proceed up and down the hierarachy, like the classification system of a library. And yet, we ourselves hold information in a non-hierarchical manner, perhaps our own “world” is more like cabinets of curiosities.

Martin: I looked at how the concept of the wunderkammer is being applied today. I found a surprising number of personal references on the web, whose tone was, more than anything else, nostalgic. This nostalgia inspired me to create a social space that, although public, could allow for personal and individual interpretation.

Steve: What’s the connection of collecting to memory?

Martin: Memory involves not just recording facts, but also inference, rehearsal, and building a context for thought. The WonderWalker helps with all of these: the map is a context, the relations between objects help you infer meaning, and the process of collection forces you to rehearse your memory.

Marek: It’s not so much memory itself as objects of thought. For me, coming from architecture, buildings are concrete expressions of ideas. A collection of idea-objects representing a “world”? When you go to a show, you try to get immersed, you see people engaging with some “other”–that which isn’t themselves.

Steve: Describe your collaborative process. How do you think about your roles in the process?

Marek: Martin and I meet once a week for lunch, we always order the same curries. We e-mail constantly. I create fixed images, Martin creates programlets of “actions.” We show each other things we find interesting and have short conceptual discussions. In everything we do you see a fraction of what we thought had potential. It’s like making soup, you create a rich mix of ingredients to work with, then select what’s freshest.

Martin: I agree with Marek’s characterization. I think we are both people who enjoy exploring many ideas at once. What you see in the WonderWalker is a particular constellation from a very large sky!

Steve: What is the role of the audience in relation to your work on the WonderWalker?

Marek: A couple of years ago we had been toying with the idea of replacing language on the web with 3D hieroglyphs. To read would mean to travel in virtual space. The problem was how do you create meaningful shapes? In the WonderWalker links are represented by icons that people draw themselves. Also the spatial relationship of links is important, as you can create areas based on particular themes. Martin and I used the beta as a sort of messageboard between ourselves. It became apparent that we were creating a social space as well. We would add links based upon their relationship to the project, then others would add theirs to ours.

Martin: The social space is critical. As Hannah Arendt says, actions performed in public are generally superior to actions performed in private. When people add an icon, they know that others will look at their comments and choices, and that makes them work and collect with a higher standard in mind.

Steve: How would you describe your level of engagement with the idea of open source software, broadly defined?

Martin: I’m only slightly engaged with open source software. I’ve worked on some projects with Rhizome.org that are open source. I think open source is important, and I’d like to do more. As in my answer to the previous question, I believe that when people know they are being watched by others, including the programmers, they perform at the highest level of excellence.

Marek: Not sure if I am engaged with open-source as much as the idea of self-organizing systems. I am designing a hat shop today for Amy Downs, who tends to change her shop decor every season. Instead of creating a design I am designing a variable system of components. One season there is a wall of flagpoles (beneath hats), the next season a bunch of animal masks. Inventing potentials for social interaction!

Marek Walczak: The nature of navigable interfaces, where you attempt to link your physical mobility with ideas or thoughts. It’s been hard to think of an instance where that can be satisfying. Landscape gardens (Stowe in England for example), were configured between a walk (after dinner) and theoretical structures puncturing the landscape. So a Greek structure would want to spur conversation about platonism, a gothic one… and so on. Instancing the sculpture garden in VRML, a 3D navigable interface, although more like waving your hand than walking, still it was a perfect opportunity to explore that. This led to the idea of “tours,” where a particular theme is developed as you walk through the garden. But also, unlike physical structures, you can bring up the theoretical, or factual accounts as you click on or pass by–so the spur to thought is explicit.

Remo Campopiano: Specifically what interests me about this project and VRML worlds is that we are in something where our movements affect what we see. Unlike flat Web pages, in the VRML garden you have a sense of place, you know where you are.

You can explore the grounds in a similar manner as the real-world garden, but with added functionality because you are not limited by Euclidean concepts of space. To explore a related art concept you can instantly jump to another location, or to related information about Oldenburg from the Guggenheim Web site. And all the time retaining that sense of place–you are “in” the virtual Walker.

SD: Certainly the idea of being “in” a certain place is a kind of rallying cry for immersive environments. Truthfully, however, I think I only experienced this viscerally in a CAVE at the Electronic Visualization Lab. The VRML 2.0 spec was only ratified as an international standard recently, but I wonder if you nevertheless see the technology as transitional? I know everything is transitional, but is it more like a chip, which doubles in capacity every 18 months and almost requires you to buy this years fins, so to speak, or like CD-ROM, which once you get a 4x drive, it works more or less ok and is still waiting to be replaced by DVD after a run of 5 or more years?

MW: Well the biggest new development is the graphic cards, so you have an instance where hardware and software have only merged in the last 6 months or so (the difference between seeing the site on a new PC or one a year old is like the difference between wading in jello and running down a hill). There have been many attempts to best vrml on a PC in the last two years, but none have really succeeded–just last month Microsoft announced that it has indefinitely delayed Chrome. However the real breakthroughs are coming in the gaming industry. Now that is interesting, as already there is a generation brought up on a kind of 3D interface that keeps developing. There dozens of sites for gamers now, and its interesting to see how much the hardware/software companies are responding to what goes on there. So you have a culture under development.

RC: Yes, and my first truly immersive experience was dating in an online metaworld, but it is this suspension of disbelief we are striving for–when you forget where you are and become consumed by the content.

There’s not much doubt the VRML specs are transitional. VRML worlds will not become ubiquitous until they are multi-user environments with avatars communicating via voice. Unfortunately, the current specs do not support avatars, and it may take a whole new protocol, design with this in mind, to make this possible.

SD: Maybe my real question is whether a museum like the Walker is mistaken for taking such a nascent technology seriously or do you think it is capable enough to be interesting to more than the converted?

MW: I guess my point is that its not just a technology, but a whole way of seeing, and it is growing. Aren’t museums are better off taking it seriously?

RC: I see the project we’re doing as terraforming. We’ve established a beachhead–a place for artists to stand, look around and re-form areas to their own vision. We’ve explored a few of the many possibilities in an attempt to inspire further exploration.

It’s true that VRML is not infecting the Internet with the same fervor as HTML, which is causing people to question its relevance. But VRML is much different. It is founded on the visual not the word, which is precisely why artists should be its first colonists. Business doesn’t know what to do with it, artists will.

It’s also true that 3D Web technology is developing far too slowly, and the abandonment of the Cosmo division of SGI has to make you question the future of VRML. But the Internet needs a 3D interface. And if it is not VRML, it will be something very similar–probably developed by Microsoft.

This frustration with slow development of 3D Web technology has influenced my next artwork for the Attleboro Museum entitled A Rupture in Cyberspace. It is a traditional art installation (meaning no cutting-edge technology) dealing with the space between the real and virtual world–what does it look like when these worlds collide?

SD: I too believe that it is artists who will help point us to new uses of the Net, including VRML and/or 3D interfaces, but there is also the issue of programming. Can you talk a bit about how you work with each other and others to bring the necessary skills to a project? In other words, what about the artists who are not programmers?

MW: I experience art-making as a process that involves a bunch of different people, each of whom contribute their particular skills. In my architectural work I am in constant collaboration with engineers and fabricators. You build up a way of doing things, where the working method has an implicit conceptual basis that is explored and developed over time. I started work on a computer 4 years ago and took to it immediately–the programming is really easy for vrml and working with programmers is a blast. Mostly, programmers find this type of work enjoyable, which helps. I’m amazed how few people are doing this–perhaps the problem is more to do with the fact that there are few financial incentives. Even painters who go for years holding second jobs dream of being able to support themselves through their art. So its great that the Walker commissioned this work, and let’s hope other institutions and companies can come up with a way to provide more support for experimental online work…

RC: Technical art projects like this one necessitate a new breed of artists. A project like this needs vision, organization and technical skills. We, including you Steve, all contribute to the evolution of the vision. I have some of the technical skill, and I’ve helped form the vision, although my major contribution has been organization. Marek has contributed most to the vision and the technical.

Artists that are not programmers are for the most part not making net.art. It’s hard to be a painter without a deep understanding of paint. I know this sounds a bit harsh, but collaborations between a traditional artist and the people that know and understand the networked environment of the Internet have, IMHO, been oddly unsuccessful. The most interesting net.art that I’ve found comes from people that are immersed in the activity of being online. Their work is about being online in the same way that the early pioneers of photography were making art about the photographic process and exploring a new way of seeing. Net artists are exploring a new way of being. And this will eventually transform how we live, how we communicate and how we look at each other.

Imagine being in a metaworld and speaking with another avatar. … who are we in that situation? … how real is the experience? … are we still completely human or have we somehow merged with the technology and transformed into a new, possibly evolved, entity? These are some of the questions that artists and philosophers are dealing with right now.