A World's Fair in the Air

The free-form spirit of the Internet World's Fair seemed to be everywhere. Unlimited real estate meant that anything could be built there - parks, office buildings, little hovels, mindspaces, breeding grounds for cattle. It was a real free-for-all. I suppose that whenever a new technology is created, there is always a certain amount of time that goes by while people figure out what it actually is and what it's good for. The metaphors of highway and home were just beginnings. Is the net a mall? A stage? A library? Lots of roads leading out to suburbia? Maybe all of these things at once and many more. So why not see if the net would be a good place to produce a world's fair?

Of course, it would be easy to say that the net is already a permanent year-round world's fair. People from virtually every country in the world are represented there. But what was fun about the Internet 1996 World Exposition was watching people be playful with the definition of exhibitions and pavilions. This was not a fair that featured competition between nations for the coolest structure. "Randyland" was a great example of someone who decided to build his own personal pavilion starring himself. And why not? Maybe the days of identifying ourselves by nationalities are really beginning to break down.

In the past one of the purposes of the great world's fairs has been to introduce people to new ideas and technologies - from steam engines to hamburgers and Ferris wheels. Is this still a primary goal of a late-twentieth-century fair?

Getting information and finding out what is new doesn't seem to be a problem to most Americans who are plugged in, not just to the consumer culture but to mass culture. Increased speed in every medium has meant that we are constantly being updated on technological and cultural developments through the net, TV, radio, and print. It is not hard to find out what's going on in music, film, politics, spelunking, space exploration, or basketball.

For the specialists, there are huge and frequent conferences on everything from acoustical engineering to theme park construction. Communication networks abound so technical and scientific researchers rarely find themselves working in a vacuum. Technical expositions such as SIGGRAPH and MILIA are held with increasing frequency. The big art fairs such as Dokumenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale present mammoth overviews every two years. Endless trade fairs of all kinds present the tools and engines of the future. Information processing is becoming more and more global every day.

In many ways, though, we are so inundated with information that many people simply want to be able to pare it down in some way, to make it at least a little bit more manageable. So a world's fair in the air, a fair that's democratic, open-ended and experimental, seems like a great way to focus some of this energy. Maybe it's the beginning of the construction of another floating world where borders are more porous and identities can shift more easily.

Another purpose of world's fairs in the past has been to present a hopeful vision of the future. Fairs are a celebration of progress. The image of fairgoers gazing up at the Eiffel Tower or the Crystal Palace is a picture of people looking into the future.

But, at the end of our own century, a lot of people are getting pretty bored of endlessly speculating about the future. Promises that technology will improve our future lives have been surrounded by the powerful drives of consumerism. There is an enormous pressure for people to get with the program, get up to speed, compete. Buy! Buy! Buy more bandwidth, more storage, more memory, more speed and if you don't you'll be left behind in the dust with the rest of the digital homeless. So what began as a promise becomes in fact a kind of threat. As technologies escalate and things get faster, a lot of people get caught up in what amounts to a sort of personal arms race, building up arsenals of equipment, and for what? So we have to keep getting more and more stuff endlessly: And we will never ever have enough. It's like we're in a race against speed itself.

The dark side of technology was a wonderful part of Malamud's story.

He points out how cars destroyed the centers of many of our great cities and how technology backfired when a Santa project was threatened by intense high-speed spamming.

On the other hand, the speed that enabled the world's fair to happen in the first place left its mark. World's fairs have always featured speed. They have also left very visible and usable networks in the form of highways and trains. The networks left by the Internet 1996 World Exposition are harder to see but the high-speed data lines crisscrossing the Pacific created for the fair will certainly make future communication faster.

If the purpose of world's fairs has always been spectacle, there's no doubt that an Internet world's fair has a hard time competing with the real world. No matter how great the graphics and interface, images and sounds on a computer can't compete with the dazzle of a moon shot or the excitement of the Super Bowl, which have the additional advantage of happening in real time, live. Half-time at the Super Bowl has become an amazing demonstration of equipment, logistics, and camera choreography. The commercials that continually interrupt are demonstrations of the most advanced and sophisticated graphic techniques.

Two Super Bowls ago, I was talking to some artists who live in Bratislava. They had seen the game and while they had no interest whatsoever in football, they had been so astounded by the elaborate half-time show that they decided to emigrate to the United States, believing that any country that would put so much flamboyant energy into a ballgame must either be a nation of lunatics or else weirdly warped avant gardists. Either way, they decided to become Americans.

When they finally arrived, by the way, they weren't disappointed. One of the first things they noticed was the purple lights that various drivers attach to the bottoms of their cars, for no reason at all except maybe to create the illusion that their cars were floating around on little purple clouds.

The Internet 1996 World Exposition had much of that same playfulness. And when it tapped into real time events, like Kasparov vs Deep Blue, the crowds came out. In the end, this Internet world's fair almost seemed like it was the beginning of a construction of another strange and floating world, where borders are more porous, where identities can shift, and where time can slip from past to future. As the very first fair in the air, it was nowhere and everywhere. I had the feeling that many of the guests logging on were thrilled to have found their way there. It was an achievement just to have arrived out in the second dimension. And as we continue to shape this new world, the eclectic and democratic spirit of the fair will be important things to remember and to build on.

Laurie Anderson
New York, New York