An early concept for an internet-based communication platform, developed before social networks became a cultural infrastructure.
Iceland Project, excerpt of Videoinstallation, Super 8
In 1999 Florian Mehnert developed the Iceland Project as a concept for building a communication platform on the internet. Its central subject was the human need for communication and self-representation at the moment when the internet suddenly made real-time exchange with many people worldwide possible.
The project proposed chat rooms, image uploads, commentary, livestream webcams and a physical project building in Iceland. It anticipated questions that would later become central to social media: permanent visibility, public self-presentation, stored traces and the relation between live experience and recorded memory.
Mehnert began realizing the elaborate project in 1999. It remained unfinished, but its structure already formulated an artistic model of participation, global communication and self-observation.
The building
In the lava fields of Iceland, between Keflavik Airport and Reykjavik, a project building was planned as an analogue meeting place connected to a global online public. A glass dome would open the view into the surrounding lava fields, while side rooms were designed for concentrated participation in the chat system.
The building was conceived as a site that would be audiovisually represented on the internet through livestream webcams. Visitors physically present in Iceland would become visible and audible online, while remote participants could communicate through the platform.
Self-representation
The first contact with the Iceland Project was intended to take place online. Through a chat platform, visitors could communicate with participants on the internet and with people physically present in the building.
After returning home, participants would be able to access recordings of their own visit. The project therefore linked presence, documentation and memory: the participant could observe their past self and relate the recorded image to lived experience.
As an island, Iceland symbolized isolation. The project building formed the counter-model: a site of global audiovisual communication in which isolation and worldwide visibility were placed in direct tension.
