While you were here

2001

Sensorium Group (JP)

"While you were here" is a project that the Ars Electronica Center originally produced in collaboration with the Japanese artists group Sensorium for the Province Expo 2000.

You are not alone in this world. The world is not only this place. Even in those places where you are not present, the present is taking place. While you were in the Ars Electronica Center, it is precisely this present that is taking place: people were being born, people died, five species became extinct, 500,000 people took off in airplanes. A bomb was detonated; two people were kissing. It was day on one half of the globe and night on the other. Winter here, summer there. In the East, it's already Monday; in the West, it is still Sunday.

With this installation, we are attempting to enable our visitors to experience the world through the medium of time, and indeed, their own personal time¡Xprecisely the concrete period of time that they have just spent in the Museum of the Future.

To go about this, each visitor receives from the Museum's box office a Ticket imprinted with an individualized barcode that serves as their access authorization for the museum, the Internet and for their personal time computation. When they register by scanning in their barcode upon entering the museum, the period of time that they spend in the museum automatically begins to run. When they leave the Ars Electronica Center, they have to scan in their barcode once again to terminate the timekeeping process. At the "While you were here" station, they can obtain a printout of their personal time, which they can take along with them.

Their personal time is then used to compute data based upon various statistics that are regularly updated.