Imagining the Information Age: Stories/Visions

Imagining the Information Age: Stories/Visions is the second in a series of collaborative telecommunications performances that investigates the possibility of building the future from a creative convergence of multiple voices and diverse realities.

Stories/Visions connected two sites together via the Internet - the ACM Multimedia 1994 Conference held at the Hyatt Recency Hotel in San Francisco's downtown business district, and the San Francisco Digital Media Center, a community technology access and training center in the Mission district. Although in the same city, these sites are sociologically disconnected.

People from both sites were invited to tell stories or dreams with which to shape the future; or to share visions of what they expected the future to be. They were also asked to identify themselves by name, place of origin, and the site from which they were telling their story.

Stories/Visions can be read sequentially, or by identifier. The sequential reading weaves together stories and visions from both sites into a single text. The identifier indices (authors, origins, and sites) provide an anthropological/sociological handle of sorts with which to analyze the stories. Like the participants themselves, the identifiers are self-selected rather than scientifically assigned, and collectively weave a multitude of realities into the same index.

I connected the two sites because of the perceived gaps between them, both economic and cultural. Stories/Visions is an invocation towards closing the gap between rich and poor, and opening communications among people of all races and ethnicities.

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