Abstract

Since 1994 the experimental art project, Paris-Réseau, has been a “(net)work in progress”. Texts, images and sounds gathered in various ways before, during and after a performance by the group Art-Réseaux at the Paris Video Library form different layers in the Paris-Réseau Archives, a hypermedia database. Paris-Réseau assembles photographs, sound samples, videos and texts to form a composite image of the city, combining digitised traces of physical places and people with information garnered from individual and collective memory.Paris-Réseau comprises at least five projects. It began very simply, gradually expanding to encompass different time frames and a very large number of paths throughout the city. Then in an effort to compose all this disparate information into a coherent whole, I began zooming in on selected itineraries. Here I will just sketch out the first phases of this project which have already been described at greater length in an article published in Leonardo. (O'Rourke 1996)