INVITATION
to participate in:

Sites such as these…
a net.art project

Sites such as these… is an imaginary journey through geo-physical
space and cyberspace. Sites such as these… is a web project based upon
a series of postcards collected by an unknown English person travelling
in the USA in the mid 1920's. The postcards, which are all hand-coloured
views of diverse landscapes, monuments, places of interest and public
buildings, were found in a flea market in Northern England some time
ago. The 1920's postcards represent a vision of a lost or imaginary
America, a kind of Virtual America. The basis of this project is to
project several virtual geographies onto one another by combining the
digitised postcards with a series of messages sent by participants from
many remote geographic locations, using email. Hyperlinks to other web
sites extend the layering and mapping of this virtual geography

I would like to invite you to participate in the project by contributing
a short message for one of the postcards. It will only take a small
amount of your time.

Please point your browser to

http://www.trdkunst.no/resite/pcp/pc20.htm

where you will find a small reproduction of one of the postcards. Please
use the "mail to" link on the web page to send your reply.

Your email should be in the form of a short message of the type you
might write on the back of a postcard.

It is not necessary that your message should comment directly upon the
scene depicted in the postcard you have been given, though you are of
course free to do so if you wish. I hope however that the image will act
as a trigger that helps you to formulate your thoughts.

If you wish, you may send your text as an html document, with hyperlinks
to external web sites included in the body of your text. This is
entirely optional.

Please also supply URL's for your home page(s) and for any online
projects you have made, participated in, or simply wish to have included
within the "map" of Sites such as these…

When all of the correspondents have replied, a site will be constructed
using all of the postcards with their associated messages, with mail-to
links so that participants may establish communication with one another.
A stamp will be produced for each post card, representing in some way
the identity of the sender of that postcard. The stamp will function as
a kind of avatar, linking to your home page or to relevant information
about yourself.

Factual information (with appropriate links to associated web sites)
about each postcard will be incorporated into the pages. This
information is unknown to the sender of the postcard and is intended to
function as another level of "narrative geography."

There will be a mailing list created with addresses of all participants
and this will be circulated to all so that you may contact one another
independently. Many participants may already know one another, but
few–if any–will know all. The common thread is that all invited
participants are engaged in different ways in the development of new
cultural practices based upon the use of the net and of digital
technologies.

Sites such as these… is the first project to be developed for reSite,
a new web space to be launched in early 1999. One of the founding
principles of reSite is that it will focus mainly on projects that make
creative re-use of existing materials, both online and offline. reSite
will remake, remodel, reconstruct, recombine, redesign and reinvent.
Participants and partners who share an interest in these strategies are
cordially invited to propose and initiate projects for reSite.

Sites such as these… will be launched in the early part of 1999.

I thank you for taking the time to read this message, and sincerely hope
that you will also take the time to participate.