Remember the HelloMrPresident project? Back during the 1991 Davos World Economic Forum conference, the designer Johannes Gees set up a web site where anyone could type a message to send to the conferencegoers. The messages were routed to a laser-projection system that displayed them in enormous letters on the side of a mountain facing the Davos ski resort.

Well, this December 10-13, the World Summit on the Information Society will take place — and Gees is at it again. This time, he’s doing the “HelloWorld” project, and setting up four projectors to display the messages on the UN building in New York, as well as three other sites in Geneva, Bombay, and Capetown. You’ll be able to SMS a message to be displayed to power elites worldwide.

As he puts it in his PDF explanation of the project:

THE HELLOWORLD PROJECT IS A REAL SPACE INTERFACE
FOR IDEAS THAT ARE TOO BIG TO FIT ON A COMPUTER SCREEN

The message of the HELLOWORLD installation is:
- The world is one place. Information technologies are the highways along which ideas travel.
- Technology allows people to share their thoughts and insights.
- The power of words can overcome dissent.
- Information technology can strengthen the voice of every person, worldwide.

I love the sly reference in the project title. It is, of course, a nod to the use of “Hello, world!” as the first-ever piece of code that most people use when they’re learning a new computer language. Crack open just about any manual on a computer language, and the author will begin with a lesson on how to display text, and they’ll use “Hello, world!” — a witty evocation of sci-fi visions of artificial intelligence, where the machine comes awake and greets us with childlike innocence. Of course, half the time the A.I. winds up being a wonderful salvation and helpmate for humanity … and other half the time it becomes self-aware and rains hell down on the planet and everybody screams and screams and screams.

Ah, the razor’s edge between utopia and dystopia. What fun! This is something that most everyday people don’t realize about computer culture. Coders almost always know that when their software and networks become complex, things can often spin out of control. They won’t accidentally give birth to HAL-style A.I. — just good old-fashioned chaos, both destructive and creative. It’s lesson that applies to global politics as well, and it is, in a very subtle way, something underpinning Gees’s project too.

(Thanks to Textually.org for this pointer!)