The First Great Space Station on the Internet by Larry Harvey
It becomes a realm of virtual reality. There is no context other than what we bring to the environment so it is possible with the help of a few props, a little inspiration to fashion your own reality - to make your own world. Not only that but at the same time you're a member of a community where everybody else is freely doing the same thing. Not only can you enjoy that kind of liberty but you can feel connected to others who are doing the same thing.
It’s got another property though - it’s not completely free. We're subject out there to the laws of nature. Black Rock is all about immediacy, that desert is an arena in which vast natural forces collide. The weather there is incredibly volatile - huge dust storms, half-mile walls of plummeting dust moving across the plain, mini-cyclones, thunderstorms that happen with incredible swiftness that rain through clouds of dust creating gobbets of mud that fall on you. That can dissolve the desert crust into a vast mire of mud in an instant! We go through these things every year and suddenly people are shocked out of their little individual worlds and their sovereign egos are dwarfed by the majesty of forces which are completely beyond them, and they're sharing this experience instantaneously with everybody else.
We have a large group of people who are the Desert Rangers led by the semi-mythical, wholly mystical Danger Ranger who has the ability, in fact, and nobody can explain it, to bi-locate and appear in two places at the same time. I've seen this happen but I can't explain it myself.
The Black Rock, as you look at it at night, spangled with fires across the plain each one like a website. Each one a self created world - which you can freely navigate anywhere you want, there are no boundaries to restrict you which is very like peoples' experience - or at least their ideal notion of what cyberspace is. There is one great difference, of course. In cyberspace, you're anonymous, in cyberspace you don't have to look at anyone face to face. In cyberspace, you don't have to confront any immediate physical needs. Whereas the desert is all about immediate experience and the challenge of survival together, I think that's what cyberspace needs. I think in some sense, we're like the first great space station on the Internet. I've wanted to do for years The Worlds Smallest Net in the desert. This would be typical of the kinds of installations that we do. I'd like to make an installation that connected two computers through an insulated wall and two black canvas chutes that led into this chamber. People could go in and they could have conversations with people that they're never going to see face to face, never touch, never really know in immediate physical terms. They could have their conversation, leave by separate chutes and never see one another. It would be live, on the net.
In a way you know cyberspace is a wonderful idea but it will never lead to community unless its grounded in some sense of survival, real survival in the immediate world together. It’s a wonderful tool for putting community together, but as a meeting ground, for human beings it’s in fact rather alienating. But that tool is serving us very well.
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