When you enter the gallery space and see "Mirage", you will probably experience it as meaningless. You are correct. "Mirage" is an interactive work. Interactive in the sense that it is first when you intervene with the installation that the meaninig becomes apparent. A good number of interactive works continue to appear meaningless because the way in which one shall interact is too complicated or cumbersome for a public to use it. With Mirage, the interaction method is simple - the only thing you have to do is to move about in the room, something a gallery public is used to doing. Generally speaking, experience is the focal point of art. This applies to both artists and public.

Motherboard's Mirage met me, no, engulfed me as I came up the stairs and entered the exhibition. A large screen on the one wall, and a projector on the other: not exactly unexpected. The image on the screen shows screens within screens, just as when you turn two mirrors towards each other and stand between them. The screen images were diffuse: greenish, unsharp, uncertain. A large round clock with a mouse-marker projected onto it was mounted on the screen, and was the only solid indication which made me certain that this was a mirroring and a repetition, and not just a porridge. Wise from experience, I went over to look for a webcam (I've been to a net.art exhibition before) - and, sure enough, a video camera stood right by the side of the projector. Smile to the camera! Jump infront of the camera! Dance! Spin! Clap! And turn around and wait - one minute, maybe two, then you see yourself on the screen. You see yourself dancing with yourself, you hear the sound of jumping at the same time as you see your own face cover the whole screen, staring at you. Two old men came in and looked sceptically at the whole scene. They had no idea why I smiled in my dance with the screen. They moved quickly on.

...It could have stood [in the catalogue] that Mirage [also] was a commentary on the surveillance society: it watches over us. Our fascination with watching others, and being watched ourselves. I think we enjoy them both, personally.

When I came home to my machine and net connection and searched after more stuff about what I had seen, I discovered that the screen images which are generated by Mirage are being streamed out on the net, you can see them now, if you have RealPlayer. I would really have liked to have known this when I was at the exhibition, then I would have danced with even more vigour, danced with the net, with an imaginary other.

On this point I think that the museum has failed. It's great to show netart or cyberart or technoart or whatever it now is, but it's just not good enough to print a bright pink catalogue and think it's giving adequate information to the public. It's not good enough to write in the catalogue that "the art lives it's own life on the net" while neglecting to communicate what exactly the game is about. Why on earth can't the catalogue be published on the net, at least parts of it, and some links! The Sternersen Collection and Bergen Art Museum's websites haven't even been updated since last year - there isn't even any information about this exhibition anywhere on the web. Contemporary art?

I would have liked to have seen a net-connected computer on which to get my fingers working by the side of installations such as Mirage. I would see that they were on the net as well as being in the museum. I want to know that I can maybe communicate with the world outside.

Jill Walker, weblog, 23.01.01 (translated from Norwegian)

The first thing that meets us as we enter the art museum is ourselves, in an unending passage through time and space, through the art installation by the artist group Motherboard (Amanda Steggell and Per Platou). The video image on the wall is a delayed picture of the observer's own movements. In principle, the image is sent around the world via the Internet and comes back again, but in a somewhat smaller format, further "within" the space of the image. And so it goes on. New movements arrive. The present and the past melt together. An interactive optical experience which you can either share with yourself (you can literally arrange a meeting with your past "self" within the image) or other observers as they pass by the wall.

Øystein Hauge, Bergens Tidende, 25.01.01 [translated from Norwegian]