As part of Metamute's relaunch, we have started a project of online art commissions funded by Arts Council London, the first of which is Out-of-Sync's The Fourth Floor. Over the next year, curators Timothy Murray and Diana McCarty will introduce and contextualise a further three more, so keep an eye out. It is our hope that these works and the contextualistions provided will form a useful starting point for further discussion...

Title: The Fourth Floor :: Le Quatrième étage
Author: Out-of-Sync
Date: 2005
The Fourth Floor :: Le Quatrième étage transports the viewer to a Parisian non-place loosely based on Georges Perec's novel, Life: A User's Manual. Combining methodologies developed in traditions of hypertext, digital video and blogging, artists Out-of-Sync (Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark) animate image, experience and memory using a self-styled interface whose axioms obey traditional spatial categories only to run away with them...

Link to project

In the summer of 2001, Mute publisher Simon Worthington was offered an anonymous donation of euro1000 for the magazine. The donor's caveat was that we use the money to engage with the issue of surveillance, with Echelon being the cause du jour at the time. The result was a humorous literary competition whose call for submissions says it all... Winners were announced and featured in Mutella No. 10, 2002.