Consequently, I published the piece in the Internet – as a computer program and an own web page – and through this came into contact with the American cellist Jeffrey Krieger. In his solo performances he uses a custom-built electric cello, with the aid of which he wanted to open a dialogue with the computer program. Along with a radical structural change, this also led to an extension of the sound material: following my specifications, Krieger recorded a whole catalogue of cello sounds, which were integrated into the program. Finally the original concept mutated from an auto-poetical composing machine to a computer-based electronic musical instrument called m@ze2, which I play myself in solo performances and improvisations.

WebArt

Cyberspace itself is becoming the terrain of a newly emerging form of art (WebArt), which fills the technological, formal and content possibilities (though also limitations) of the Web with content in a completely new way, without engaging in the simple transfer of an old medium to a new one. In this area, the boundaries between the individual art forms are also becoming blurred. Above and beyond this, cooperation with artists from other branches suggests itself here, such as for example in the multimedia web installation MindShipMind (1996–98), which was created in collaboration with the Californian video artist Vibeke Sørensen:

The first preparatory work for this started in 1996 in Copenhagen during a three-week interdisciplinary symposium on “Order, Beauty and Complexity” (called ‘MindShip’) to which 35 scientists and artists from all over the world were invited. We collected the varying individual approaches in their diverging verbal formulations, mixed them up by means of a random operation (based on the transformation of multi-dimensional Markov matrices) and re-assembled them. In this way we were able to dissolve the purely factual in favour of new, unintended textual conglomerates in which the various texts pushed their way through strictly according to grammatical rules. True, the results looked grammatically correct, but in content they were often abstruse and nebulous. The observer is confronted with this and challenged, quite in the sense of radical constructivism¹

, to find an individual “meaning” in it.

Within two years, via E-mail and the WWW, we developed a multimedia web installation implemented in Perl, the structural content of which (text, layout, graphics, music, computer voice) is assembled differently by means of a random operation every time the page is called up: an unending ‘book’ whose development was also contributed to by the Berlin-based comparative philologist Florian Cramer (Perl programming) and the Quebec-based writer and graphic designer Joseph Jean Rolland Dubé (pictograms). The communication between Vienna, San Diego,