nervous_objects first came together after meeting at the 1997 ANAT National Summer School in Hobart, an intensive three-week programme focused on internet design and web authoring at the University of Tasmania’s Institute of the Arts. Drawn from different parts of Australia and different artistic backgrounds, the group continued working together after the summer school, encouraged by Amanda McDonald Crowley, then director of ANAT. What followed was an early experiment in networked artistic collaboration - one that moved across distance, code, sound, image and live exchange, and eventually found form in projects such as terra_nova.

terra_nova is a wind-driven media engine developed by the artist collective known as nervous_objects across a number of locations including Melbourne, Adelaide, Pekina, and New York. Planned in Melbourne, assembled in Adelaide, and realised in situ at Pekina, with remote participation from Anne in New York, the project was presented live from Pekina via a 33.3kbps analogue telephone modem from 24-31 January 1999.

Using live weather data from the original site - an old stone dance hall at Pekina in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia - it animates a grid of 288 cells, each containing a fragment of recovered media: photographs, video, sound, and debris from the early web. The original project was powered by a weather station installed at Pekina; the rebuilt version now draws from a weather API fixed to the same coordinates. The source has changed, but the signal remains.

Wind speed, direction, and intensity determine the behaviour of the grid: which cells are active, how they move, and how the system unfolds over time. Nothing is arranged for the viewer. The work is continuous, unstable, and always in ready motion.

This media archive was assembled through a process that nervous_objects have described as data archaeology, and has been reassembled here in accordance with the principles of the original project. What was once Ruin has now been reassembled as Shed: a structure shaped by the project's engagement with Baudrillard's notion of brokenness, from which the project's original shed/ruin metaphor emerged.

Working slowly and deliberately, the artists moved through abandoned directories, broken pages, and forgotten online spaces, collecting displaced cultural remnants: images severed from context, audio without attribution, and video surviving long after its original form had decayed.

The project was supported by a 'new media arts - development' grant provided by the Australia Council for the Arts. terra_nova combined physical travel, environmental input, networked exchange, and media recovery into a work shaped as much by weather and distance as by authorship. What remains is the sediment of an earlier internet: pre-platform, pre-feed, pre-social networks, pre-mobile phone, thoughtfully massaged into a seamless surface of which defines our contemporary web space.