Inbox is a web-based installation project in which a touch screen monitor serves as the principle interface between the installation visitor, the web content (images, sounds, texts, etc) and the selection of that content which is viewable by web site visitors. A custom designed PERL script enables the control function that is kept in the hands of the installation visitor.

In the gallery space of Video Pool in Winnipeg a touch screen monitor connected to a computer system was placed on a stand. There is no mouse or keyboard attached to this system. The touch screen monitor was open to a Netscape browser window and is referred to as the "control screen". A second computer system in the room was also open to a Netscape browser window at the url of the Inbox web site and is referred to as the "display screen". Both systems were connected to the Internet.

This touch screen monitor displayed the content of the "control screen" of the project. The installation visitor was invited to select by touching one or more of 10 images, text excerpts and other thematic web content dealing with the issues of the project in the manner of a shopper choosing items from an online catalog. Once their selection was made, they hit the submit button on the same page.

Depending on what the installation visitor chose to select, certain combinations of the web content on the Inbox web site were downloaded to be viewed by the web visitor. What was selected by the installation visitor controls what the visitor to the web site saw on the "display screen".

The web visitor is thus reduced to a voyeur with none of the customary interactive control of the web. The content is "pushed" at the web visitor using a custom designed PERL script. Depending upon the degree of risk taken by the installation visitor in their selection at the point of control, the web visitor saw certain possible combinations of the total content available.

Qualitative graphic analysis was used to categorize the content files of the project into risk/safety and private/public pairs - it was "inspired" by statistical analysis and grouping techniques used in survey analysis. These binary relations where then fed into an Excel chart. There are nearly 1000 possible outcomes of someone's intervention with Inbox. These outcomes are determined by the degree of "risk" taken by the installation visitor.

In other words, the scope of the content presented to you on the Inbox web site has been determined by the choices made by the installation visitor in Winnipeg. The risks they took circumscribed the breadth of each different determinations of Inbox. Visiting the site, the web visitor could choose between them.

Inbox is about intimacy and technology, control and risk. It explores the nature of our being and communicating in non-physical space. Virtual space is not unlike psychological space, abstract and non-linear. Inbox uses this type of space to investigate the nature of our relationships to each other and to the technology of the Internet. What is the nature of a network : human or technological? How do we function within it? How does it limit or expand our connectedness? And how far are we willing to risk intimacy if we can not see or touch the person with whom that intimacy is possible?

In Inbox, web technology served as the means for the exploration of how we approach intimacy through touch. There is an ephemerality in touching; in the wanting and longing for someone/something, in this seeking of the unknown. Inbox explored this through the juxtaposition of the technological with the intimacy of touch.