PROGRAM SIX: VIRTUAL METROPOLIS
The city with its cartographic grids, glass arcades, dazzling movie palaces, speedy metros, and bustling populations have generated the cinema of Buñuel, the poetry of Baudelaire, the textiles of Burylin, the drama of Brecht, the labyrinths of Borges, and the jazz swing of Blakey. The city is where immigrants land, cultures cross, and multiculturalism thrives. Where commodities flow, energy sizzles, and chaos reigns, the metropolis is also where poverty dwells, homelessness thrives, disease multiplies, and suffering swells. Presenting a combination of VR tours, poetic musings, subway journeys, and touristic imaginings, the artists of Virtual Metropolis reflect on the public vistas of interactivity provided by the new media. While they lead their users through virtual galleries of electronic art and digital theme parks, they confront their bedazzled visitors with curbsites of commodity fetishism, cultural neglect, and social peril. The Virtual Metropolis is the zone of the unheimlich where attraction and recognition always already border on repulsion and discomfort. Enter digitally at your own risk.

John COLETTE, 30 Words for the City, 1994 (Australia)
John Craig FREEMAN, Virtual Florida, 1999 (USA)
D. R. Isaias (Melquix) ORTEGA, Subterraneo, 1999 (Mexico)
Robert OUELLETTE, Virtual Metropolis, 1996 (Canada)
Jody ZELLEN, Ghost City, 1997 (USA)