Issue 7

Access to all regular articles. This page is intended for printing purposes. Note that the internal links to references will not work correctly.

Regular Articles

WebWatching Telematics For Libraries Project Web Sites

As the EU's Telematics For Libraries programme comes to an end Brian Kelly reviews the Web sites provided by funded projects.

Background

Approximately 100 projects and actions were funded under the EU Telematics for Libraries Programme [1]. Many of the projects will have produced Web sites which provide the services the projects were funded to deliver or reports on their activities. What approaches did the projects take in providing their Web sites? What lessons can be learnt for Fifth Framework projects? In this survey of the technical aspects of the Web site, we try to answer these questions.

Methodology

A small number of Web-based services were used to provide reports on a number of aspects of the Telematics for Libraries project Web sites. The results of the surveys (which took place on 20-21 September 2000) are published in Appendix 1. This appendix also provides links to the services themselves, so that readers can check the results at the time of reading.

The following surveys were carried out:

Server Software

Details of the Web server software used by the service. This information is obtained from Netcraft [2].

HTML Quality

Analyses of the numbers of broken links from the project home page, browser compatibility problems, the number of HTML errors and the size of the project home page. This information is obtained from Dr HTML [3].

Accessibility

The accessibility of the project home page. This information is obtained from Bobby [4].

The 404 Error Page

Whether the 404 error page has been tailored. This information is obtained by linking to a non-existent page.

The robots.txt Page

Whether a robots.txt page has been created. This information is obtained by linking to the robots.txt file.

Aims Of Survey

The aims of this small survey are to:

• Obtain a picture of the Web server and hardware used to host Telematics for Library project Web sites.
• Observe the conformance to HTML standards.
• Observe the quality of the Web sites through the number of broken links.

Summary Of Findings

Details of availability of a Web site for the projects is given below.

Details of server type is given below.

Discussion Of Findings

This small survey has attempted to provide a picture of usage of Web sites by Telematics For Libraries project Web sites.

There are several caveats which should be noted. For example many of the broken links on the project home pages are likely to be to the Telematics For Libraries Web site, which changed URLs recently (from <http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/libraries.html>). Projects which have finished will be unlikely to update such links.

However the survey has helped to identify some examples of good practice and some problem areas, including:

• A number of project Web sites provide robots.txt files which ensure that only quality resources will be indexed by search engines such as AltaVista. the RIDDLE's [5] project's robots.txt file is a good example.
• On some project Web sites, however, all robots are banned, which means that the Web site will never by indexed by search engines such as AltaVista.
• Some project Web sites provide a tailored 404 error message which provides useful navigational aids for the end user, such as links to key areas of the Web site or a search facility. The CAMILE's [6] project's 404 provides a good example.

The area of most concern, however, is probably the number of project Web sites which are no longer available (about 20%).

Future Work

The methodology for monitoring and evaluating remote Web sites using Web tools will be developed. It is intended to carry out a more rigorous survey of projects funding by the Fifth Framework DIGICULT programme [7] and to publish the findings in the Cultivate Interactive Web magazine [8].

References

1. Telematics for Libraries - Projects, European Commission
   URL: <http://www.cordis.lu/libraries/en/projects.html>
2. Netcraft
   URL: <http://www.netcraft.com/>
3. Netmechanic
   URL: <http://www.netmechanic.com/>
4. CAST's Bobby, CAST
   URL: <http://www.cast.org/bobby/>
5. robots.txt File, RIDDLE Project Web Site
   URL: <http://www.cwi.nl/robots.txt>
6. 404 Error Message, CAMILE Project Web Site
   URL: <http://www.dmu.ac.uk/~camile/foo>
7. Digital heritage and cultural content,
   URL: <http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka3/digicult/>
8. Cultivate Interactive,
   URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/>

Appendix 1

A summary of the findings is given in the following table.

The information in the table was collected on 21 September 2000.

Notes

No Web site

The following projects appear never to have had a Web site:

• COBRA (no. 18)
• EDILIBE I (no. 31)
• EFILA97 (no. 37)
• ELITE (no. 40)
• ELSA (no. 41)
• IFLA-EU (no. 59)
• INCIPIT (no. 63)
• ION (no. 64)
• MASTER (no. 73)
• MORE (no. 78)
• OLUIT (no. 82)
• ONE (no. 83)
• ONE II (no. 84)
• PLAIN (no. 85)
• USEMARCON (no. 100)
• VERITY (no. 102)

Project Web site no longer available

The following project domains are no longer available:

• DALI (no. 21) at http://dallas.ucd.ie/
• DECOMATE (no. 25) at http://cdservera.blpes.lse.ac.uk/
• ILIERS (no. 60) at http://195.97.146.102/
• MOBILE (no. 77) at http://www.efc.co.uk/
• MURIEL (no. 80) at http://www.teles.de/
• SELF (no. 90) at http://www.sppb.se/
• SESAME (no. 91) at http://www.3di.it/
• SOCKER (no. 92) at http://mediator.uni-c.dk/
• SPRINTEL (no. 93) at http://www.iol.ie/
• SR TARGET / PARAGON (no. 94) at http://mediator.uni-c.dk/
• VAN EYCK (no. 101) at http://www.hart.bbk.ac.uk/

Project Web page no longer available

The URL of the project's Web page is no longer available, although the domain is still available:

• ARCA (no. 2) at http://www.pisa.intecs.it/projects/ARCA/
• BAMBI (no. 3) at http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/bambi.html
• BORGES (no. 8) at http://borges.compapp.dcu.ie/
• CDBIB (no. 15) at http://www.konbib.nl/kb/sbo/proj/cdbib/
• DECIMAL (no. 24) at http://www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/dic/research/decimal.htm
• EDIL (no. 32) at http://www.inist.fr/accueil/edil.htm
• EFILA+ (no. 36) at http://www.ewos.be/fora/index.htm#efila
• FACIT (no. 52) at http://www.komm.ruc.dk/FACIT/
• HISTORIA (no. 57) at http://www.wmin.ac.uk/~vassilis/historia.htm
• PUBLICA (no. 87) at http://www.croydon.gov.uk/publica/
• REACTIVE TELECOM (no. 86) at http://ris.niaa.org.uk/reactive.htm
• TRANSLIB (no. 96) at http://peterpan.uc3m.es/proyectos/translib/HomePage.htm

Survey Limitations

It should be noted that there may be limitations in the services used to carry out this survey. For example, it has been noticed that the Netmechanic link-checking service does not understand the HTML element <BASE> which can provide a alternative directory for relative URLs. This was the case for the MALVINE home page, which contains no broken links and not 26 as reported by Netmechanic.

This paragraph was added on 18 October 2000.

Author Details

Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
England
BA2 7AY

URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk>
Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk

For citation purposes:
Brian Kelly, "WebWatching Telematics For Libraries Project Web Sites", Exploit Interactive, issue 7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/webwatch/>

ESSIR'2000: Information Retrieval by the Lake

Fabio Crestani reports on the Third European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR'2000) held in Varenna, Italy, by Lake Como, on 11-15 September 2000. The event was jointly organised by Maristella Agosti of the University of Padova (Italy), Gabriella Pasi of ITIM-CNR (Italy), and the author of this report who is working at the University of Strathclyde (Scotland).

Information Retrieval in Modern Times

Here is a story that Fabio Crestani has been telling since his return to Scotland after co-organising ESSIR'2000:

"Coffee or tea?", the young female waitress from the catering service asked me. "Coffee, please", I said, as any real Italian would, even after a few years spent in a tea-drinking country. She served me a good coffee and a good smile. I smiled back politely and that, I think, broke the ice. She had been providing catering services to Villa Monastero, a conference centre partially owned by the Italian National Research Council (CNR), for some time, but something in her look told me that this event was different. As I was one of the organisers of the event, I decided to enquire about this, fearing that something could be wrong. "Nothing wrong at all", she told me, "Just, we are not used to have so many young people attending, here", she added. She explained me that most of the events (conference, workshops, summer schools, and so on) organised at Villa Monastero were attended by somewhat "older" people. The average age of participants to this event was considerable lower than that of other events organised there, she intended. "What topic is it, that you are teaching, that attract such a young crowd?", she asked me. "Information Retrieval", I said puzzled.

For those of you that are not familiar with this topic, like the young waitress, Information retrieval (IR) is the science and technology concerned with the effective and efficient retrieval of information by its semantic content [1]. The central problem in IR is the quest to find the set of relevant documents, amongst a large collection, containing the information sought, thereby satisfying an user's information need usually expressed by a natural language query. Documents may be objects or items in any medium, text, image, audio, or, indeed a mixture of all three.

IR is certainly not a young topic, having been studied for long time by librarians and computer scientists for over 50 years. However, IR is has had a surge of interest in recent times because of the World Wide Web. Finding information on the Web or in one of the increasingly available digital libraries has been compared to "finding a needle in a haystack" [2] and new technologies and tools need to be designed and developed to make all this information available and really useful to users worldwide.

Access to information has gone through a slow but steady process to adapt to the growth of availability of electronically stored information. When libraries were small, access to a piece of information could be achieved by asking the librarian, a "wise sage" who was supposed to have read every book in the library. The librarian could tell you which book contained the information you needed and where the book was located. When the number of books began to exceed the limits of human memory, categorisation became necessary and library classification systems such as the Dewey or the Library of Congress' were developed. Each book was assigned a set of subject headings that identified the topics treated in the book and a location in the library. Only by knowing the appropriate set of subject headings that identified the searched information one could find the location of the book in the library. With computers and the availability of electronic text comes the possibility of searching through the entire text of documents (book, articles, etc.) to find words and phrases that identify a document as containing the information sought. This free text searching ability meant that the searcher did not have to rely on someone else looking for documents for him or assigning documents to particular categories. Nevertheless, if on one hand this puts the searcher in control of the search, on the other hand the searcher now has to know which word to use to express his information need when looking for documents, and every so often he has to know how to use the tool that performs such search.

With the increasing availability of electronic text and with the searcher becoming the user of an information accessing system, it became necessary to develop systems that were both easy to use and effective. The birth of the World Wide Web has magnified enormously this problem, as everybody knows.

So, in over 50 years researchers in IR have developed and evaluated a bewildering array of techniques for indexing and retrieving information. These techniques have slowly matured and improved through refinement, rather than there having been one or a small number of really significant break throughs.

The purpose of the Third European Summer School in Information (ESSIR'2000), held in Varenna (Italy) at Villa Monastero in September 2000, was to pass on to younger generations of researchers the expertise and knowledge acquired by some of the best European experts in IR and related areas. There is a widely perceived need of new developments in IR and, like in many other fields of research, significant breakthroughs are more likely to come from younger minds than from experienced researchers. Indeed, there was a very young level of participation at ESSIR'2000. As organisers, we have very happy of this. We hope that more advances and, perhaps, some breakthrough, will come to IR from this young international crowd that for a week attended the school and strolled along the shores of Lake Como. Here is a short report of that event.

ESSIR'2000

The Third European Summer School in Information (ESSIR'2000) was held at Villa Monastero in Varenna (Italy) in September 2000 [3]. It is part of a series of ESSIRs that began in 1990, the first one was organised by the University of Padova (by Maristella Agosti) and was held in Bressanone, Italy in 1990. The second ESSIR was organised by the University of Glasgow (by Keith van Rijsbergen) and held in Glasgow in 1995, in the context of the IR Festival which consisted of ESSIR '95 [5], a IRIDES workshop [6], and the final MIRO workshop [7]. ESSIR'2000 was jointly organised by:

• the Institute of Multimedia Technologies of CNR (National Council of Research) based in Milan, Italy;
• the Department of Computer Science of the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland;
• the Department of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Padova, Italy.

The administrative support was provided by Milano Ricerche, a consortium of industries, research institutions (CNR among them) and the University of Milano, whose purpose is to provide administrative and technical support to research and development activities of its members.

The scope of ESSIR'2000 was to give to its participants a grounding in the core subjects of IR, which included methods and techniques for designing and developing IR systems, Web search engines, and tools for information storing and querying in Digital Libraries. To reach this scope, the program of the ESSIR 2000 was been organised over the following lectures: an introduction to IR, fundamental IR models, evaluation in IR, multi-lingual information access, multimedia IR (audio image, and video), digital libraries, IR and users, uncertainty and logic in IR, modelling vagueness in IR, IR on the Web, and IR and structured documents.

The lecturers of the school were leading European researchers (with only one extra-European exception). Their course subjects strongly reflected the research work for which they are all well known.

ESSIR'2000 was intended for researchers starting out in IR, for industrialists who wish to know more about this increasingly important topic and for people working on topics related to management of information on the Internet. The proceedings, (that were distributed at the school in draft and that will be available in final form shortly [4]) contains 12 chapters written by the school's lecturers detailing the state of the art in IR and related areas. They contain experience distilled from many years of work.

ESSIR'2000 Programme

The programme of the school was very dense, comprising of 11 lectures, divided in basic (6 lectures) and advanced (5 lectures). Here is briey what was taught and who did it. More information can be found on teh Web site [3], [4].

Keith van Rijsbergen (University of Glasgow) gave the opening lecture by introducing some underlying concepts and ideas essential for understanding IR research and techniques. He also highlighted some related hot areas of research, emphasising the role of IR in each.

Norbert Fuhr (University of Dortmund) lectured on main mathematical models of IR. His lecture gave the theoretical basis for representing the informative content of documents and for estimating the relevance of a document to a query.

Paraic Sheridan (TextWise) and Carol Peters (IEI-CNR) presented, in a nicely concerted way, the issues and proposed solutions to multi-lingual information access in digital archives.

Stephen Robertson (Microsoft) addressed the topic of evaluation.

Alan Smeaton (Dublin City University) and John Eakins (University of Northumbria) addressed issues and techniques related to indexing, browsing and searching multimedia information (audio, image, or digital video).

The lecture by Ingeborg Solvberg (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) covered the basics and the challenges of digital libraries.

The lecture by Peter Ingwersen (Danish Royal School of Library and Information Science), the First on advanced topics, concentrated on users issues and usability of interactive IR.

Fabio Crestani (University of Strathclyde) and Mounia Lalmas (University of London) addressed the use of logic and uncertainty theories in IR.

Gabriella Pasi and Gloria Bordogna (both from ITIM-CNR) presented the area of research in that aims at modelling the vagueness and imprecision involved in the IR process.

Maristella Agosti and Massimo Melucci (both at the University of Padova) addressed the use of IR techniques on the Web.

Finally, Yves Chiaramella (University of Grenoble) addressed the issues related to indexing and retrieval of structured documents.

An Inside Look

The school was a success. Not just in the words of the organisers (whom you would expect to claim so!), but and most importantly by the judgement of the participants. ESSIR'2000 was a success not just for the quality of the quality of the lectures, the authority of the the lecturers, and the beautiful surroundings, it was a success because it was informal and interactive. For the best part of a week more that 60 participants and 12 lecturers exchanged ideas and inspirations on where IR is at and where it should go to. Many (not only the school participants, but some of the lecturers too) went home with renewed encouragements and motivations.

Not everything ran smoothly (as Murphy's law teaches us). There were tense moments when Fuhr's demos did not start and when in the middle of Robertson's lecture the electricity went off. There was also terror in the eyes of the participants when, after the official dinner on the other side of Lake Como (in Belaggio), the boat chartered to take everybody back to Varenna did not show up on time. The thought of a long cold swim after such a wonderfully filling meal put the life of the organisers in serious danger. We are sure other faults can be found in the organisation of the event. Nevertheless, the vast majority of participants went home very happy with their experience. That is not only the impression that we gathered but it is also the feedback that we received and are still receiving.

Finally, from the point of view of the organisers, it was very hard work. It took months to organise the event and although it is now over, we are still working for it. Nevertheless it was a useful and enjoyable experience from which we have learned a lot.

So far, ESSIRs have been held at a five-year interval. We hope this interval will be considerably reduced in the future. The large participation of young researchers to ESSIR'2000 shows that there is a very active interest in the field and one that is likely to grow even more in the future. We are ready to pass the torch to the next organisers, to whom we will be happy provide our experience in the organisation of such an event.

Conclusions

Indeed, there was a very young participation at the Third European Summer School in Information (ESSIR'2000), that was held in Varenna (Italy) by the Lake Como, in September 2000. Probably a much younger participation than other events held there. As organisers, we are very happy about this. We hope that more advances and, perhaps, some breakthroughs, will come to IR from this young international crowd that for a week, thoughtfully but joyfully, strolled along the shores of Lake Como.

Acknowledgments

The main financial support for ESSIR'2000 was provide by the registration fees and by the the Special Interest Network on Information Retrieval of the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS-IR). In particular, CEPIS-IR made available a number of grants for young students and researchers to attend the school.

Other financial support was provide by the following sponsors: Microsoft Italia, Mondadori, Oracle, Sharp Laboratories of Europe, and 3-D Informatica.

Finally, the following institutions provided general support: the Gruppo Specialistico Tecnologie e Applicazioni Informatiche (AEI) and the Convention of National Societies of Electrical Engineers of Europe (EUREL).

References

1. C.J. Van Rijsbergen. (1979) Information Retrieval, Butterworths. Also available online:
   URL: <http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Keith/Preface.html>
2. C.J. Van Rijsbergen. (1993) The state of Information Retrieval: logic and information, Computer Bulletin, pages 18-20, February 1993.
3. ESSIR'2000
   URL: <http://www.itim.mi.cnr.it/Eventi/essir2000/index.htm>
4. M. Agosti, F. Crestani, G. Pasi. (2000) Lectures on Information Retrieval, Springer-Verlag, 2000. In press.
5. ESSIR'95
   URL: <http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/essir/>
6. IRIDES
   URL: <http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/irides/>
7. MIRO
   URL: <http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/miro/>

Author Details

Maristella Agosti
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informatica
Universita' di Padova
Padova, Italy

URL: <http://www.dei.unipd.it/>
Email: agosti@dei.unipd.it

Fabio Crestani
Department of Computer Science
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, G1 1XH, Scotland

URL: <http://www.cs.strath.ac.uk/>
Email: fabioc@cs.strath.ac.uk

Gabriella Pasi
Istituto Technologie Informatiche Multimediali
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Milano, Italy

URL: <http://www.itim.mi.cnr.it/>
Email: gabriella.pasi@itim.mi.cnr.it

For citation purposes:
Maristella Agosti, Fabio Crestani and Gabriella Pasi, "ESSIR'2000: Information Retrieval by the Lake", Exploit Interactive, issue 7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/essir/>

The Virtual Worlds 2000 Conference: an Island of Negative Entropy

The Virtual Worlds 2000 conference was hosted by the International Institute of Multimedia (Pôle Universitaire Léonard de Vinci) in Paris, France between 5 - 7 July. Its focus was virtual worlds with a component of Artificial Life. Joseph Nechvatal reports. This article originally appeared on Rhizome.org [1].

Virtual Worlds 2000

Something exciting happens when one looks at various subjects not for closed conceptual systems, but to find an ever-opening conceptual edge. This conceptual edge is more and more important today after we have learned that modernist reductionist assumptions are not easily changed by mere postmodern negations. For example, postmodernists typically reject scientific reductionism, but often assume a kind of fractionated cultural reductionism. Thus people stay trapped in the scientistic objectivist model because it is largely the only working one out there. What seems to be needed are self-mutating conceptual models to think differently with; self-re-organizing conceptual models that are never just the completed or inverted objectivity of the usual conceptions.

Hence, details concerning a plethora of new conceptual and procedural models shown and discussed at the Virtual Worlds 2000 Conference [2] - which was held for three days in July at Ple Universitaire Lonard de Vinci in Paris - might give us some sense of the many promising conceptual points found there - even though the private discussions I had with participants were often even more abstract and complex and not fixed to the topic I am reporting on here. But we all seemed to agree that we no longer needed a further contextual completion before we can reject any reduction of human processes to the completed/objectified kind, even while we still respect science and its logic as a recognizably special tool within a new art/science matrix.

Prof. Jean-Claude Heudin, director of the International Institute of Multimedia Lab and chairman of Virtual Worlds 2000, aimed to avoid any fall-back by starting off and catalyzing the conference with a succinct but stimulating talk on the conferences goals, which, like the first Virtual Worlds conference in 1998, were to develop a discourse around the merging of Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Life (A-Life) - the study of synthetic systems that exhibit behaviors characteristic of natural living systems.

Unlike the first conference in 1998, this one was better organized as a single thread and even though there were three key-note speakers (Bruce Damer, Ken Perlin, and Claude Lattaud) they did not dominate the discourse. As a result there was very good rapport at the conference between the diverse international participants and a general feeling that virtually nothing is impossible with co-operational imagination. Cyborg imagery in pop culture, I suppose, has fruitfully fertilized this optimistic ontological feeling by imaginatively inviting people to experience their ontology through losing track of their bodies and becoming (what seems to be) pure consciousness - even though people all over the world have now grasped the fact that even dis-embodied self-conceptual models bring old conceptions of the sexual body with it because as the self becomes progressively more detachable from the location of the body, it becomes increasingly constituted through and in communication processes. The postmodern critique of the sexual/racial body and the problems it poses are now widely understood too, but many are bored by the constant stoppage, as every conceptual model of the body can be made to seem a fall-back into an older politics or metaphysics - and hence a backhanded re-affirmation of them. Thus the benefits of studying ontological complexity via apparently autonomous computational self-modeling systems.

This rhizomatic discourse embraces such diverse fields as advanced computer graphics for virtual worlds, evolutionary computational systems, simulation of ecological systems, simulation of physical environments, multi-agent on-line communities, evolutionary applications for cyber-art, and a host of philosophical traditions. Indeed, except for an overall idea of a coming immersive evolution, there was great diversity at this extremely informative gathering; a gathering of such intellectual breadth that one often felt like a mosquito in a nudist camp, buzzing from one promising approach to another, vampiricaly loading up on them all. But I found this diverse, interdisciplinary approach warranted, for with Virtual Worlds 2000s emphasis on merging Virtual Reality with Artificial Life we come to a fundamental human exploration concerning the spatialization of consciousness relating to the recognition of life (a working definition of life is quite important to establishing whether an artificial system exhibits life or not but such a definition is still under debate with some biologists insisting that life can only be found in certain hydro-carbon chains while Schrdinger and Von Neumann early on speculated that life is best characterized as islands of negative entropy, a.k.a. information). That doesnt sound too high-minded, does it? because the applications are rather banal; ranging from apparently intelligent computer game avatar simulations to system-bot on-line education and business uses. Well, even so, the high-mindedness is justified in that in Virtual Worlds 2000 a new kind of apparent art/scientific animism was being devised; a buzzing animism that incorporates the recognition of life in artistic, computer scientific, virtual worlds. Hence, Virtual Worlds 2000 continues the opening of a new discourse after postmodernism. Whereas Virtual Reality has largely concerned itself with the design of 3D immersive spaces, and Artificial Life with the simulation of living organisms, Virtual Worlds is concerned with the synthesis of digital living wholes (systemic synthetic worlds). Thus it continues to move us past the time when it was revolutionary to undermine the idea of apparent logical unities.

This synthetic/emergent approach has opened possibilities that were missed by both foundational models and by their postmodernist negation. VR/A-life studies then systematically escape postmodernisms either/or; we are neither just logical nor arbitrary. Hence, VR/A-life studies gets us past the postmodern alternatives as it systematically exceeds formulation and yet it is far from arbitrary. This approach can re-establish apparent empirical findings within a more critical omnijective context, rather than the strict postmodern disbelief in empiricism. And this is as it should be, for VR is not strictly a virtual enterprise. It is a fuzzy virtual-actual (viractual) one thus a radicalization of classic Cartesian dualism - as with VR the electronic apparatus supplements both the bodys limitations and its classic imaginary spaces and mental possibilities as the equipment systematically supplements the mind/bodys powers of perception.

Moreover, as we are learning through the Human Genome Project, like everything, life itself has been succumbing to digital dematerialization. But with VR/A-life inspired life, life is even better characterized as a viractual process, rather than the digital substrate in which that process is embedded. This seems right to me, as our life has an apparent order that is more intricate than a single conceptual system. VR/A-life is clearly not static or fixed. It is dynamic.

Without dynamic viractuality, digital ontology encounters a major quandary as life re-mutates into binary modulation, re-structuring human reality again into a new breed of dualing Cartesianalities. But with the dynamic viractual socioepistemic ontology offered in the study of VR/A-life which comes about through the particular viractual conjunctions of body and digital technology we are enabled to construct new forms of intersubjective ontology and apparent ways to embody those ontologies to slip into them, take them on, and live them out immersively to their outer edges.

While we might have once assumed spatial separation between the body and digital technology, the viractuality found in VR/A-life effects a recuperation of spatial absence through temporal presence. This viractual notion places us at once at the most general and limiting condition of our existence. Our bodily existence, or embodiment, is from this standpoint understood to have a viractual range of potential experiential modalities in relation to features of cultural and historical context.

As the interpenetrating of bodies with digital technologies continues unabated, becoming more and more seamless and pervasive, new domains of art experience and being-in-the-world become colonized by this ontological demand. Sure, VR/A-life research is currently devoted to synthesizing new and more seamlessly aesthetic ways to interface embodied ontology with disembodied computer intelligence. However, the majority of people today clearly do not show any special interest in Artificial Life or/and Virtual Reality as art they perceive them exactly in the same way as they perceive the creation of any other specialized conceptual esoterica. Equally, people dont comprehend their own ontological internal processes because how we define the extended viractual space of our life is always more than cognitive like good art is. Therefore, the quintessential VR/A-life concept of emergent complexity via immersive genetic algorithms is a valuable conceptual model for art today in that much of its emergent computational work is organized in a "bottom up" fashion; focusing on local rather than global behaviors, while centering its ontology around poly-sexual cellular automata, neural networks, enzyme catalysts, nanotechnology, RNA strands, and immersive computer models of ecological systems.

But it is not just art. As Prof. Heudin indicated, VR/A-life is a major new ontological medium based on the collaboration of science, technology and art. With VR/A-life yielding up some useful insights into procedure, we might self-study our own organisms apparent behaviors and environmental interactions by studying our life as it might be. This is clearly not a counter-revolution against postmodernism but an emergent surpassing of it. Instead of mere postmodern pluralism we might create for ourselves an apparent complex unified ontology made up of emergent multiple-selves by involving a sophisticated steering of artistic applications into a fully ontological immersive context. Such an interplay between evolutionary self-representational dis-embodiment and emergent being-in-the-world embodiment is precisely the viractual issue found in all post-biotechnological applications of the computer, as demonstrated at the conference by both Jeffrey Ventrellas and Tina LaPortas work.

By being taken up into an emergent viractual environment, the complexity of ontological life consciousness is re-represented in VR/A-life and, I would suggest, altered as the computer VR/A-life manipulator encounters emergent representations of her own bodies processes. Thus the VR/A-life inquiry will continue to unfold under its own weight from the point of view of the extended reproducing body, with the next set of emergent ontological questions necessarily having to do with how VR/A-life worlds (for they are always multiple) are constituted, what it means to have them, how they feel, and precisely how we may inhabit them aesthetically.

References

1. Rhizome.org, Rhizome is an online community space for people who are interested in new media art.
   URL: <http://www.rhizome.org>
2. The full list of conference participants with the abstracts to their papers can be found at the Virtual Worlds 2000 site
   URL: <http://www.devinci.fr/iim/vw2000>
   The full proceedings have been published on the Springer Web site
   URL: <http://link.springer-ny.com>

Author Details

Dr. Joseph Nechvatal

jnech@hotmail.com
<http://www.intelligentagent.com/satyricon.html>
<http://www.dom.de/groebel/jnech/>
<http://www.dom.de/groebel/jnech/ideals.htm>
<http://www.cybertheque.fr/galerie/jnech>