METACITY/DATATOWN is based on the video installation of the same title produced for the Stroom Center for the Visual Arts.

METACITY“Due to ever-expanding communications networks and the immeasurable web of interrelationships they generate, the world has shed the anachro-nism ‘global village’ and is transformingi nto the more advanced state of the ‘Metacity.’”

The world’s available territories for the metacity:

Using numbers or data to describe the vast-ness of the Metacity.

Selecting data according to hypothetical prescriptions,

diagrams work as emblems for operations, agendas, tasks.

DATATOWNbased only upon data, it is a city that wants to be described

by information. THere is no given topography, no prescribed ideology, no rep-

resentation, no context.

Using Extremizing Scenarios,

data lead to frontiers, edges, and therefore inventions.

Datatown is constructed on a series of ‘what-ifs’ that embody different assumptions, so it

is always in progress.

If the world settlement envelope has been filled up with 376 datatowns,

the world capacity will be 18 times the current population.