Meet the man who almost invented cyberspace: Paul Otlet

With his last book Cataloging the World : Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford University Press), Alex Wright replaces Paul Otlet on the time line of Internet pionneers and remind us of Otlet’s visionary projects anticipating the Web as we know it today.

New York-based author (and specialist of User Experience at IBM, Harvard and now Etsy.com) Alex Wright is a familiar of the Mundaneum. As early as 2008, he wrote about the Mundaneum int the columns of the New York Times, and in 2012, at the World Science Festival in New York, he postulated the prophetic value of Otlet’s ideas in front of the “father of the Internet” himself, Vinton Cerf. The world discovered then the (Belgian) father of the Internet idea. It was in Mons in 2013 that he gave a talk in Mons with Pr. Boyd Rayward about the “forgotten forefathers of the Internet.”

The online Art Talk The Platonic Network is part of the  Google Art Project, aiming, among other things, to broadcast conferences about art with a participative Q&A.  On 3 September at 17.00h CET, Wright will tell us how modern technology proves Otlet’s project of worldwide information sharing right!

Link to the Art Talk and information