The Negative River
"The Negative River" or T.N.R. (1996) was a collaborative internet project by Károly Tóth (H/NL).
T.N.R. screenshot
A co-operation of artists, writers and scientists who create a navigable organic environment, using the river as metaphor. The participants - Hannah Cox (GB), Attila Csáji (H), Hilda Kozári (H/FIN) and Ilona Lénárd (H/NL) - contribute documents and digital traces from their living environment which are used to build up an information database. From this database, a reconstruction of a new spatio-temporal structure, a Terra A-Topia, is made in virtual space. The project is less concerned with the latest technical developments in hard- and software, than with the technologies of thought, imagination, intuition and perception. If information is accepted as one of the physical conditions of matter, then cognition has to be viewed as a fundamental basis and the memetic engine of our understanding and 'mapping' of the world. The virtual model of The Negative River incorporates a series of mutually influential data events that create a morphing, continuously transforming and interactive structure of thoughts and cognitive relations.
