International premiere: with the opening of IMPLANT, Workspace Unlimited's two other works -- EXTENSION and DEVMAP -- will be simultaneously launched in Ghent, Montreal and Rotterdam.

Workspace Unlimited's new work IMPLANT is both an electronically networked interactive virtual world and an installation physically situated in the magnificent Art Nouveau building of Vooruit, a performance venue in the center of Ghent. Founding members artist Thomas Soetens and architect Kora Van den Bulcke create a digital 3D version of the entire building and its surrounding environs which users can access and navigate on computers from inside Vooruit and simultaneously from the Society for Art and Technology in Montreal, and V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam. In this way Soetens and Van den Bulcke exercise their most compelling gesture: re-imagining Vooruit as transmittable architecture, an ongoing and revisable place that does not adhere to our ordinary understanding of physics, nor to the continuities of space and time.

Once logged into IMPLANT, visitors navigate through two co-existing architectures that slowly begin to reveal themselves: a sumptuous simulation of the real Vooruit, a large complex maze of theater spaces, cafes, meeting rooms, and offices which can be traversed in much the same way we move through physical space--walking upstairs, through doors, down corridors, around corners, inside and out. And a hidden hyperlinked architecture that emerges as users interact with the model's various walls and ceilings. This secondary architecture is full of marvelous incongruities and illusions--portals that transport us immediately from one place in Vooruit to another completely disregarding the usual spatial/temporal constraints of the analogue world; virtual cameras that allow us to secretly follow other visitors and project onto walls in front of us their journeys and activities; or we might even walk through the projection and find ourselves together with them in the same space.

The longer visitors explore IMPLANT, the more layers they will encounter. Embedded throughout the virtual world and triggered at various moments users will also encounter video and sound documentation from a recent online symposium called Breaking the Game. The symposium brought together an international group of competing theorists and practitioners to build, debate and reflect on virtual worlds, computer gaming, immersive technologies, and new possibilities for artistic practice and experience. Workspace Unlimited is interested in breaking down oppositions between practice and theory, and seek to explore creative ways of making virtual worlds that are both, intellectual and poetic, hallucinatory and sensual.

Outside on the real street, passersby will peer into Vooruit's glass lobby only to see a projected simulation of the same lobby seamlessly integrated within Vooruit's façade. Instead of seeing the usual theatergoers purchasing tickets and socializing with friends, viewers will observe the goings-on of avatars, graphical representations of actual people in Vooruit co-mingling and exploring the same simulated space with their counterparts from Montreal and Rotterdam. Playing on the oppositions between real and virtual, interior and exterior, imagination and perception, seeing and being, Implant questions the nature of identity and the limits of representation.