The video is a documentation of my (MA) project developed while studying Michel Foucault’s thoughts on heterotopia, a concept he came up with while studying somebody else’s thoughts on spaces and places. His most simple example was that of childhood games, building blanket forts and making up mental spaces within the given physical realm. I tried to build one online, by connecting selected (web) sites with web banners, using Google Ad Words and nice words. 

This place I have suggestively christened Uville, after AT&T’s tagline ‘You will’, used on arguably the first web banner in 1994.

The project itself goes on to explore the new territory within online marketing and the aesthetics of spatiality, to disturb the established order of both of these doctrines, and propose a new way of engaging with this two-dimensional screen environment. It is not exactly a critique, neither is it a game. It is a model of a house made of ‘web material’ - URLs, sounds, videos, images, hopes and fears - narrated through web banners. Instead of dispersing one’s attention, they will be used to bind together these disparate parts of a landscape. 

Uville strives to become a house built from other houses. An ephemeral heterotopic space measured in euros - its local time doesn’t run by the atomic clock, it’s measured in clicks instead. The web banners give it a temporal dimension, a dimension that will collapse and vanish as soon as the invested 100€ are clicked away by the visitors.

In order to articulate this unique notion of a landscape I have coined a term - neuland art. Neuland as in Angela Merkel’s slang for internet, and land art as in Robert Smithson’s art. It’s website-specific.

In the video I am reading parts from my Diary - heterotopic sories based on real-life events. 

Thanks to everyone who participated and whose works I've used in this project, including: Kareem Lotfy, Manuel Roßner of cerma.de, Krist Wood, Lucas Odahara, Babak Radboy, Eva Papamargariti, Sara Ludy, Slavko Ćusić, Sabrina Ratté, Claudia Maté, Manuel Fernandéz, Rafaël Rozendaal.

Gallery from the gallery (slideshow)