Yes, this idea is at the very base of the project. The European Commission organized an architectural competition focusing on a concept for the exhibition pavilion being more than a building, but an entire communication structure in itself. This criteria has guided their decision in favour of the winning project by ' bigmama ' and consequently, our participation in the project.

In this manner the collaboration with the architects of the pavilion started with the conception of an interactive building linking each architectural element to the interface, becoming a sign, in order to set up a communicational infrastructure as much from the external as from the internal view point. The project conception thus focused on the visitor using technology and being involved with it, rather than its illustration. The development of such a structure implies a transdisciplinary approach. The commissioner support for the project and the concepts at its base is today really more than an idealism, but rather a necessity.

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Confronted to such a huge amount of difficult data to communicate, such as presents the IC politics of the European Commission, the starting point of the project was to unify different forms of data visualisation and representation ( textual, graphic, spatial...) in one single system. An interface exploiting the specificities of each media to built up an efficient information access. The project 's objective therefore was to set up one single system using various visual codes to allow the user different forms of reading and understanding. We thus started the project by building up synthetic content maps to structure the entire interface where the use of different media would allow the user a progressive consultation, from the most general to the most specific information.

In the project, the user navigate steps by step, from keywords (text), to color, icons and finally images indexes ( cartographies ), the whole structured in a spatial system. It appeared to us that a three-dimensional system was the best mean to present this multi format content in a unified, continuous experience, if only, because their specific cartography showed that they could all be bound to a spatial logic and to spatial parameters.

According to this reflection the project is built out of five layers, matching the five steps of information access and the five used medias. Each of the five is organized in form of overlapping spheres, that the user can navigate or cross according to the kind of reading he/she wishes to follow. At the last level, the user is dressed automatically on the surface of the central sphere, while the camera he/she pilots switches from global to first-person perspective. This state of consultation corresponds in the interface to the info_city illustrated through daily situations by image and video.

Each layer thus constitute an information system with its specific visual and perception codes corresponding to the media used. This principle give the user the possibility of different approaches, different readings of the content. In this manner the information system merges the one of a textual cartography, also known as 'hyperbolic trees', with an image navigation system, frames by frames. Here the user consults information through its movement in a three-dimensional space. This spatial information structuring allowed us to introduce a third axis, a third parameter allowing to create a continuous and seamless passage from one reading mode (meaning extraction) into another. Here, space operates as an information structure, and architecture, its discipline, provides models and methods of information structuring as much in the pure spatial and functional level as at the semantic one. The use of 3D thus allows multi-level, or rather, multi-dimensional information indexing, adding deepness to the screen, the Z-buffer, displacement parameters, speed... as the parameters of perception (global camera to first-person camera perspective). Parameters, which all has been used in the project to constitute the interface, a navigation system integrating media and their specific codes.

To illustrate for better understanding, the sphere as basic model used, for example illustrates very well this approach: on the one hand it operates as a simple and well-known spatial model , but it also brings forth a global vision of the content, which is essential for information access and navigation as well as interface manipulation. But the main reason that made us choose such model is that it is an efficient way of structuring information in a non-hierarchic, spatial manner. This principle constitute the very basis of hypertextual cartographies, and which according to the simple spherical model, allows a direct understanding of the various indexing parameters. As a matter of fact, 3D navigation adds another important parameter in information indexing - time. This parameter is mainly used in the project in the image navigator, where the user's movement switches from image per image consultation to a 25 frame per second video navigation, and where the various displacements of the user are in fact cinematic operations : stop is a 'still', jump is a 'cut'...

The challenge of the project therefore was multiple : on the one hand, the structural and semantic research of a hypermedia interface, and on the other hand, the necessity to synthesize the its content up to the level of sign and code to brings forth its main lines. In this manner the sphere allowed us to integrate the various structural principles of the "textual hyperbolic" navigator, the ones of the icon navigator and more globally, the ones of a perceptual and cognitive system. An interface using the specificities of 3D navigation, the use of a camera, to create an information structuring code, a semantic system to built up an hypermedia.

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... the project constitutes a research on the structuring and visualization of information processes, (communication, storage and computation) in textual, graphical and spatial forms, an approach that we define and qualify under the term 'MetaDeSign'. Further the Info.scapes_Info.society forms an interface where the various representation are not dissociated, but form a fluid system of interleaved signs and codes. From this angle, the project is based on an articulation of various signs constructed out of the crossing of temporal and spatial parameters. Here the cartographic analysis of different media constitute what is called a hypermedia.

In this setting of an information architecture, we used a methodology that is to be found in all our projects, sPACE navigable music and others. A method based on the constitution of a sign system as much on the structural and semantic level as on the cultural one, through this design of parameters. The project thus take entirely part of our global search for a specific language of the digital media, and its articulation within a discipline, 'MetaDeSign'.

In this sense, the project allowed us in a quit unique way to experiment the entire chain of information, from programming software to specific hardware development. Here the different elements, from the specific joystick, we developed, to the spatial projection system to the quadraphonic sound spatialisation up to the interaction with the physical space, the pavilion architecture, all these different elements has been integrated in the global design concept, even if at the end not everything did turn out entirely as we expected in the beginning. In regards to this setting of an information chain, a project like space navigable music fits perfectly, even though it is oriented toward music, while Info.scape is aimed at information access. The project Info.scapes is drawn from the experiences we made before, as much on the level of parameter design and 3D real-time principle, as on the level of spatial displays inside which the user operates. The project thus constitutes another step ' versus an architecture ' as much digital as physical.

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In regards to the ITU WorldTelecom in Geneva, it was not a wide audience event but a specialist's fair on new technologies of information and communication. The question of addressing a wide non professional audience was therefore not necessary. In any case, I tend to think that the issues related to information structuring are not the themes that interest a wide audience. It is a field of specialists that needs a fair deal of knowledge and practice of the medium in order to be able to assess its interest.

I believe that a project like SPACE_ navigable music, because of its performative aspect, correspond much more to those criteria. To the contrary, the fact that the EU Commission representatives entrusted lab[au]'s approach, sustaining an experimental approach, using the latest technology, is a more significant argument. They did not reject a more conceptual approach for the sake of a so-called wide audience, but they rather wished to differentiate themselves through a coherent and less reductive approach.

Yet, we did bring special attention to the 'user-friendliness' of the system, because the user has a central role in the general conception of the project. After all, it is the user who interacts with an entire building, which reacts through his/her navigation as much through color, image and sound. Also the use of various media to constitute different levels of understanding in the consultation of the content is drawn from a similar concern. In short, we have developed the project in what we thought would be the most coherent manner, in regards to the question of a 3D navigation system allowing to visualize the EU policy and its leitmotivs, without excluding anyone, but without making artistic or conceptual trade-off.

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The collaboration with the French information designers Bloc6tm (http://www.bloc6tm.com) started with the EU Commission project Info.scapes, in which they are authors of a good part of the graphic design and the 3D modeling of the interface. The collaboration on the project is in fact a consequence of a meeting at the Netd@ys 2001 where we presented at Recyclart (Brussels) for the first time Space, navigable music in multi-user mode and as a musical performance. Our research on the possible forms of interactions between sound, image and space crossed a similar research that they were developing, which became afterwards their Bloc6tm project, a multi-user interface allowing to compose the music in realtime within a 3D space. So there are many converging points between their project 'bloc6tm' and our project 'Space navigable music'. At the time of the project ' Info.scapes_Info.society ' and with our extremely busy agenda, we contacted them for their technical skills but also and foremost, for the convergence of our ideas.

It is since the project for the EU Commission that we co-lab[au]rate. Ever since than, we have worked on the exposition 'architecture vs music' in our exhibition space MediaRuimte (Brussels) and a new performance juxtaposing the two projects in their specific and shared approaches. In fact, the exchange of ideas and similarities in the artistic approach brings us more and more closer, up to consider our fusion.

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The performance Bloc6tm vs Voice Spa(z)e is mainly a confrontation between two projects that share the same reflexion in essence, but which have resulted in very different developments. The potential of this juxtaposition is to show that information design as parameter design, here related to music and space, can produce a considerable variety even if they are drawn from the same methods.

For the netd@ys 2003 event the two projects will be shown in their most advanced form, which means for bloc6tm, the multi-user interaction principle in order to create a mini-concert in real-time. As for spaze, navigable music, it is the development of a voice recognition module. This module allows to compose in real time music through voice instructions and simultaneously generate a 3D spatial architecture. Here the performer will be able to navigate and to compose spa[z]e music with his voice displayed in real time in quadraphony and a 360° panoramic space. It is therefore a considerable artistic and technological advance for both projects and for the public, a new kind of performance.

In the long run we hope to be able to set up an event around the notion of spaze music, a live performance bringing different artists around this notion together and so to confront different technological and artistic developments. Our objective is to conceive and gather designers working on music specific to the digital media, and based on its parametric principles. We aren't dealing with multimedia, where the focal point is VJ-ing, but to merge different media in a structural and semantic form allowing to compose , visualize and interact with music in a spatial manner.

As the sPACE_navigable music constitutes today a platform for artistic collaboration between musicians, graphists, architects... here in this new form of performance it is a confrontation and an exchange between information designers that conceive "new" parametric systems.

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