METACITY/DATATOWN is an art installation that explores how the world is transforming into a "Metacity" due to expanding communications networks. It uses numbers and data to describe the vastness of the Metacity and Datatown, a hypothetical city based only on data without topography, ideology, or context. Datatown is constructed through a series of "what if" scenarios that embody different assumptions and is always a work in progress.

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

3. 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.’”

4. The world’s available territories
for the metacity:

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

7. Selecting data according to hypothetical
prescriptions,
diagrams work as
emblems for operations, agendas, tasks.

8. DATATOWN
based 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.

9. Using Extremizing Scenarios,
data lead to frontiers, edges, and therefore
inventions.

17. Datatown is constructed on a series of ‘what-
ifs’ that embody different assumptions, so it
is always in progress.

19. If the world settlement envelope has been
filled up with 376 datatowns,
the world capacity will be 18 times the
current population.