The basic idea of "Virtual Roof" is to provide multimedia for everyone -including those that no one else thinks of. Rather than being driven by the euphoria of technical developments and being degraded to a playground and experimental laboratory for the high-tech industry with its expensive show environments, the art project "Virtual Roof" intends to demonstrate new directions. If media competency represents a ticket into the information society, then those whose numbers are constantly growing may not be left out in the cold:

People without work, without money, without a home ...
Instead, people who are disadvantaged are put into a position where they can use new media to articulate and improve their own situations, to help others. The intention is to effectively help them to reclaim their dignity and self-respect. The project "Virtual Roof" provides a virtual home and thus at least an electronic address to those who no longer have a home. This is the starting point for actions and events in various cities to encourage even more initiatives for helping people to help themselves.
As a work-in-progress, "Virtual Roof" provides street newspapers ("asphalt magazin hannover") with a platform for presenting their work, for example, and encourages institutions like these to make themselves heard in Cyberspace through virtual presence. In this way, informal contacts under the cover of anonymity lead to actual encounters with people who would have had nothing to do with one another in a normal city setting (as it actually happened in Hannover in March this year, when young students met with newspaper vendors).
Over a thousand visions have already come under the shelter of the virtual roof of the Ruhr region in Germany, the first homesteading region. These are passed on to the responsible politicians and evaluated by scientists and the communal association of the Ruhr region. As virtual empirical data, they form a basis for improving living conditions in this region.


Links: http://www.hack-roof.de/

Hermann Josef Hack (D), studied free arts with Josef Beuys. Free-Iance artist since 1990. Founder of the "Global Brainstorming Project", an initiative for improving the interdisciplinary communication o f important global concerns. He has worked with Van Gogh TV - piazza virtuale - for documenta IX, and initiated projects such as "Global Switch". In 1996 Hack established the "Hackhypermedia virtual institute for the future", a future studies institute that works in the Internet and therefore without the infrastructural bailast of conventional institutes.