Michael Aschauer
Josef Deinhofer
Maia Gusberti
Nik Thoenen
(spanish)

./logicaland is a project study for visualizing our world´s complex economical, political and social systems. It tries to engage people into strategies of raising human sensibility and responsibility within the global networked society. The challenge is to develop ideas, tools and visualizations that fit the requirements of complex correlating systems and our world’s complex participative environment../

logicaland v0.1“ is a work in progress, an attempt to realize a prototype of a global simulation that is to be controlled by a community of unlimited participants.
Based on a scientific global world model of the mid-seventies, modified and hacked to fit our concepts, we have developed a tool that facilitates people to take part in a simulation, unlike tools in the scientific field which are neither participative nor public.

The main idea is to provide a public web-based world-simulation within a participative environment, where all users have equal influence on the system. Everyone with internet access should be able to participate in ./logicaland. One user’s influence on the system is minimal since it is a fraction of all participants’ actions. Only if a lot of users follow similar strategies, can serious change be achieved.

We want to invite users all over the world to take part in dealing with global interrelationships by contributing to logicaland’s simulation. By now ./logicaland is a prototype but it aims to turn out into a worldwide “social game”.

./logicaland is currently based on rw-3, a global world model developed in the mid-1970´s by Fred Kile and Arnold Rabehl in Wisconsin, USA. Global world models can be unterstood as “computer programs that simulate the world in very broad, comprehensive manner. Geographically, they encompass the entire world or at least a major portion of it. More importantly, they explicitly link together a number of components or aspects of our world such as economics, demographics, politics, and the environment. Because of these traits, integrated global models can be and are used as tools to help us understand processes, whose effects cross national borders and whose study crosses disciplinary boundaries.”(Pete Brecke)

Michael Aschauer
Born in 1977 in Steyr, Austria; since 1999, master class in visual media design at the University of Applied Art; lives in Vienna where he works as an artist primarily with code in the Internet, image and sound; nominated for the 2003 International Media Art Prize of the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany.

Josef Deinhofer
studied computer science and “visual media design” in Vienna.

Maia Gusberti
worked as a freelance graphic artist in Biel; in 1995 she moved to Vienna, where she studied “visual media design” at the University for Applied Arts; she has been working as an artist and web designer since 1998.

Nik Thoenen
graduated from the School for Design in Biel; he has been working as an artist as well as a graphic and interface designer in Vienna since 1995.