In 1999, fabric | ch created La Fabrique, a 3d virtual museum built for « the 2nd World » of Canal+ (Le 2ème Monde in French), a predecessor of 2nd Life or a forerunner of other similar persistent virtual worlds on the Internet, but in a digital and realistic copy of Paris. We designed La Fabrique to question this very trivial and functional approach of 3d MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) and to develop a new type of museum, in a medium that would allow open visibility on the Internet as well as an experimental immersive experience. During three years, it hosted several exhibitions, which speculative topics were relevant in our work and the one of others around the end of 20th century.

• La Fabrique 00 – Digital Prosthesis (1999), featured artists and designers interested in net art and used to work with web3D or VRML technologies like Andy Best, Cristiano Bianchi,Jacques Perconte, Maurice Clifford, Steve Guynup, Victoria Vesna & Craig Brown.
• La Fabrique 01 – Recombinant Interiors (2000), featured students of ETHZ (CAAD), directed by Prof. Maia Engeli and Prof. Andrew Vande Moere.
• La Fabrique 10 – Algorithmic Manipulations (2001), featured students of ECAL (MID), directed by Prof. Patrick Keller.
• La Fabrique 11 – Diffused Energies (unreleased), should have featured in 2001 contemporary artists, writers and architects not necessarily used to digital technologies, but has not been completed up to now.

A retrospective exhibit, Memories of a Distant Future, is organized at Siggraph 2010 in Los Angeles by one of the digital artists who took part to the first release of La Fabrique: Steve Guynup. For this event, a video of the 3d space and screenshots of the works have been released to give a hint to current visitors. But it just gives a linear view into what is non-linear…

New web plugins (like BS Contact) allow to view the 3d content from that time, with minor errors. We’ve kept the content as it was nearly ten years ago, we’ve just had to restore it a little bit. It is therefore a digital art archaeology, but a radical one, that you’re about to dive into, once again …

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