THE CENTER OF THE INTERNET
WEB PROJECT [1997]

A web project we did as "candela2", where we declared a part of our homepage to be the official "Center of the Internet". It featured a viewing platform: "The View from the Center" [see image above], "The Golden Book", where visitors could leave their names and inscriptions, like carving their name in a tree or painting on the wall of a public WC/Toilet [for examples: see excerpts below], and in the end, a printable certificate of proof, with name and timestamp [see image at the bottom of the page]



From: Das Internet als imaginäres Museum (The Internet as an Imaginary Museum) WZB Discussion Paper FS II 98-110, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin 1998, TILMAN BAUMGÄRTEL, 10/98
http://duplox.wz-berlin.de/texte/tb

3 Traveling and Surfing: De- und Reterritorialization in Net Artworks
(...) There is a particularly amusing contribution to the uncertain and undefined “territory” of the internet, a work by the two students from the University of Kassel who make up candela2. They have declared their homepage to be the “official center of the internet.” In 1961 the Italian artist Pierro Manzoni exhibited a plinth standing on its head, on which allegedly the whole globe was resting. The “center of the internet” is reminiscent of the presumptuous artist’s gesture in Manzoni’s work, but it is also a very definite allusion to one of the features of the internet that has given many a headache to parliaments and regulators in recent years. The internet is a “distributed” computer network and has no center from where, for example, legal regulations may take a hold. If there is no “center” of the internet then anyone can declare his or her homepage, computer, or server to be the center—as an artistic act. Give me a place to stand in the online universe and I will turn the whole internet on its head... (...)








Quotations from the Golden Book, the guest book, where visitors of the Center of the Internet could leave their names and messages:

Anastasia Tsvetkova
flower_girl@fromru.com
Date: Montag, 06. August 2001
Subject: Total happiness
Finally I'm here! Looks like I've been waiting for this moment all my life and I'm very glad to be here. See you in Russia. Buy!

Stanislav Penkov
sonada@beep.ru
Date: Freitag, 27. April 2001
Subject: Just nothing
What a good idea - but where is the end of the Internet?

erixy@chat.ru
Date: Montag, 13. März 2000
Subject: I like to be here, but
sorry, don't believe net has a center, and your site exist.

s.a.v.
Date: Sonntag, 12. September 1999
Subject: the holy ghost.
i saw him, here.

Lord Jan Colabra
colabra@pleasedontspamme.com
Date: Samstag, 11. September 1999
Subject: Who's watching the center?
I was a little scared to enter at first... expecting a black hole or something. But the gargoyles comforted me some! I feel just like home! See you at the outskirts some time. LJC

hansensj@mail.vii.com
Date: Montag, 12. Januar 1998
Subject: greetings
hi from the outer fringe of the internet, Utah USA

somewhere@the.outer.rim
Date: Donnerstag, 02. Oktober 1997
Subject: Exciting...
... the mere imagination ...
... to have been ...
... at the ...
... very ...
center
.

Arne Burmeister
arne@c3po.in-berlin.de
Date: Mittwoch, 01. Oktober 1997
Subject: don't panic
place a bookmark here
so you may escape
if you ever get lost
in hyperspace ;-)

Geraldine Juarez Rivero
gjuarez@ehecatl.sis.uia.mx
Date: Samstag, 23. August 1997
Subject: Communication, multimedia, animation
now i can tell to my friends that: i been there!!! (the center of the net)

Jordan Crandall
xaf@interport.net
Date: Donnerstag, 29. Mai 1997
Subject: The center
Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
the falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: Somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving it's slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again: but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, it's hour come round at last
Slouches toward bethlahem to be born?
-William Butler Yeats