In "The Information Age," current technology is both subject matter and medium. Wrapped as an educational CD-ROM product, it stages a situation where the viewer experiences the computer's deficiency as an intelligent interface for human interaction and his gradually vanishing power of control over the machine. It is a hybrid project comprising two entities: an interactive Director movie, which functions as the primary user interface, and a website, which is being accessed from within the movie. The Director movie is an interactive presentation about major inventions and achievements in the field of electronic communications. The navigation within the piece is intentionally linear and fairly limited.
Apart from this "educational" presentation, the project also involves another level of functionality which becomes apparent only after a certain extent of user interaction: various counters monitor the user's interaction and trigger certain events which are beyond the user's control. At the beginning, the events are alerts and error messages, instructing the user to follow certain instructions in order to proceed within the piece. Parallel to the advancement towards newer technologies within the presentation, the user experiences problems of increasing frequency and fatality until control is taken completely out of his hands. Interaction turns into reaction, and finally the user is confronted with some intelligent entity which is communicating by typing chatty messages onto the screen. As the "entity" discloses all the data it has collected about the user and sends him hacking into the Pentagon web-server to shut down the Internet, the user finds himself a powerless marionette who has unknowingly handed over control to a machine.

Jutta Kirchgeorg (D), born 1969, studied Communication Design at the Fachhochschule Rheinland Pfalz, majoring in Telecommunications. 1995 she won a Fulbright Scholarship to study Computer Art at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she focused on Interactive Multimedia and Telecommunications. This spring she completed the program with a MFA degree. The submitted work is her thesis project.