Shuteye Town 1999

  Never thought I’d be doing this, but the clock is ticking and I am no longer in control of a huge work that may suddenly disappear from general public access at any time. It started as a word processing file that discovered spectacular hidden capabilities in Microsoft’s Word 97 software. It was possible to draw images, group individual elements, and attach hyperlinks to other files, enabling an incredibly early prototype of virtual reality. I had been inspired by a videogame named Myst and a savage satirical comic book called Maus to build a heavily hyperlinked image of a storage room containing links to other “rooms” I might build later to paint a picture of where our whole culture was at the end of the 20th Century.  All the boxes were clickable. This first drawing took weeks in a slow computer in 1998. A friend lent me a much more powerful computer. Between then and Christmas 1999, I had “drawn” ~3800 massively interconnected graphic files (including 200K+ words of embe...