This paper examines contemporary developments in the creation and experience of immersive 3D art projects in the context of spatial and information design. It takes into consideration historic forebears, particularly the ancient Greek art of memory, contemporary theorists, and current new media artists who are pushing code and application design to new limits. The essay specifically addresses the role of the artist as “coder” and application engineer and anticipates concerns and possible technological developments in data visualization and virtual spaces. As new media artists write their own code, current boundaries between disciplines and sectors become blurred and new aesthetic judgments become pivotal. Additionally, current management and organizational structures are challenged to confront a world that increasingly visualizes and communicates in 3D.

CollageMachine builds interactive collages from the Web. First you choose a direction. Then CollageMachine will take you surfing out across the Internet as far as it can reach. It builds a collage from the most interesting media it can find for you. You don't have to click through links. You rearrange the collage to refine your exploration. CollageMachine is an agent of recombination. Aesthetics of musical composition and conceptual detournement underlie its development. The composer John Cage and Dada artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst used structured chance procedures to create aesthetic assemblages. These works create new meaning by recontextualizing found objects. Instead of functioning as a single visual work, CollageMachine embodies the process of collage making. CollageMachine [1] deconstructs Web sites and re-presents them in collage form. The program crawls the Web, downloading sites. It breaks each page down into media elements—images and texts. Over time, these elements stream into a collage. Point, click, drag, and drop to rearrange the media. How you organize the elements shows CollageMachine what you're interested in. You can teach it to bring media of interest to you. On the basis of your interactions, CollageMachine reasons about your interests; the evolving model informs ongoing choices of selection and placement. CollageMachine has been developed through a process of freely combining disciplines according to the principles of “interface ecology.”

We look to media as memory, and a place to memorialize, when we have lost. Hypermedia pioneers such as Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush envisioned the ultimate media within the ultimate archive—with each element in continual flux, and with constant new addition. Dynamism without loss. Instead we have the Web, where “Not Found” is a daily message. Projects such as the Internet Archive and Afterlife dream of fixing this uncomfortable impermanence. Marketeers promise that agents (indentured information servants that may be the humans of About.com or the software of “Ask Jeeves”) will make the Web comfortable through filtering—hiding the impermanence and overwhelming profluence that the Web's dynamism produces. The Impermanence Agent—a programmatic, esthetic, and critical project created by the author, Brion Moss, a.c. chapman, and Duane Whitehurst— operates differently. It begins as a storytelling agent, telling stories of impermanence, stories of preservation, memorial stories. It monitors each user's Web browsing, and starts customizing its storytelling by weaving in images and texts that the user has pulled from the Web. In time, the original stories are lost. New stories, collaboratively created, have taken their place.