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elements, thus expanding the historical mnemonic techniques to include contemporary media. Here virtual art joins the current widespread trend of a «mise en scène» of knowledge, to initiate and push forward rejection of the desktop metaphor in favor of dynamically generated spatial visualizations. Agnes Hegedüs is a representative of this. Her «Memory Theater VR» (1997) invites the visitors to enter a panorama rotunda. A circular screen both marks the boundary of the virtual reality environment and forms a virtual theater. Hegedüs' panorama offers a rich array of associations leading the visitor through the history of art and media, including Mannerist, Futurist and Deconstructivist virtualities. It is a collection of decisive intellectual turning points in history, media emblemata,which are configured before the inner eye in changing combinations, allowing the visitor to form individual memory images.
One of the earliest memory spaces that was a representation of an entirely new form of public space—that of global computer networks—was «The Home of the Brain» (1991) by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss. At the ART+COM institute they created, in
Strauss' words, «a morphological simulation space, in motion,»[32] which is experienced polysensually and interactively. The architecture of Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery) in Berlin is the model for the electronic shell of «The Home of the Brain,» a digital data archive for different theoretical approaches. A modern version of a «stoa,» it offers a simulated, highly symbolic space of information where a metaphorical discourse on the ethical and social implications of new media technology takes place. These questions are illuminated through the presentation in the virtual space of seminal quotations from the very different approaches of the scientists Marvin Minsky and Joseph Weizenbaum and the philosophers Paul Virilio and Vilém Flusser.
In the 1990s the Austro-German group of artists Knowbotic Research developed another variant of immersive virtual spaces, of hybrid models for the digital representation of knowledge. Their virtual installation «Dialogue with the Knowbotic South» (DWTKS) (1994–1997) processes scientific data from international research stations to create a constantly changing abstract representation of Antarctica.