In the midst of dizzying technological change that threatens to eradicate the very concept of the historical moment, digital technologies ranging from the personal computer to the Web appear to the vast majority of humanity as an alien force, remote and beyond control, and simultaneously as fulfilling utopian desires.

Technologies are ideas given flesh, the exteriorization of the conceptual structures and utopian impulses of humanity, and so are alien only insofar as their history and materiality are unknown. Yet, the gap between intention and implementation is as wide as it is deep, and the actualization of this technology does not happen for and of itself, but through institutions that mobilize the resources, ranging from the social to the financial, that build these artifacts through metal, silicon, and human labor.

This project attempts to layout a dialectic of digital technology, focusing on how the digital technologies enabled the realization of ever increasing forms of collectivity and agency, in short - the prehistory of collective intelligence. However, many of the seminal events that define the digital era originated at for-profit research and development institutes, whose records are hidden among labyrinthine sources. While records like academic publications are public, if often difficult to find in the era before digitization of such publications became feasible and common-place, kept invisible are the patents filed by the for-profit researchers. Therefore, in order to make the invisible visible, these for patents were minded from the U.S. Patent Office.

In order to properly explicate the pre-history of collective intellience, the project was spun off into several complementary components. The first is the timeline, that tells the story of collective intelligence as a narrative spread throughout time. In order to travel to different parts of a the narrative, just click upon the color-coded events on the timeline. The timeline also contains both historical footage and interviews taken especially for this project - in order to view them, simply click upon an image and the video will begin playing if behind it lies a video, otherwise one will be delivered to a larger image.

The data from the U.S. Patent Office was merged into a Semantic Web database that contains the various links in between people, patents, and institutions. This information reveals a network of connections, the small world at the heart of digital era. This data is all stored in the Semantic Web data format RDF and publically available for mashing-up, as our interface does using Simile and Semantic Wikipedia with diverse soources such as Google Maps.

We found that in order to more properly understand the network, we had to return from the text to a visual representation, a visualization that could be created and manipulated in three-dimensions. This functionality is currently available only at the DIVE in Duke University, an immersive virtual reality environment, although hopefully soon such capabilities will be available in some form or fashion over the Web.

Enjoy your time in the history of the future. Remember, the future is still unwritten.