"The aesthetics of appearance, according to which objects or people stand out against an apparent horizon of a unity of time and space as in classical perspective, is supplemented by aesthetics of disapearance of someone in the distance suddenly rising up on the horizonless screen of the cathode-ray tube, the unity of time transferring such aesthetics onto that particular space of encounter: this is real time perspective of big optics clearly supplanting the achievements of the small optics of a perspective of real space, the vanishing of all the points (pixels) of the televized image."

(Paul Virilio)

"There's a place..."

(Stephen Sondheim)

Sisyphus is a work which has been done for Internet. The work of an artist, Antoni Abad, who is the son of a sculptor (one of those who work with stone), and son of a writer (one of those who write words). Antoni has been a sculptor when he has worked with foam, mecalux, paper or video, now with Sisyphus I am not so sure, I could not tell. If Sisyphus is a sculpture, then it must be among the biggest, together with the pedestal for the world by Piero Manzoni and some other very ironical ones that I do not know of or which I cannot recall.

Sisyphus is nowhere, it only exists when someone asks for it, in this sense it resembles a stretch or a word. In order for it to work it needs people to go and visit it.

The World Wide Web is a network which, for the moment, only arrives where the net arrives. So much poverty inside of its sophistication, so many constrictions in its so-called virtuality, so many monoliths to brake down, yet. By the year 2000 this global network will have about six hundred million users, then Sisyphus will be like a hermitage (lost) in a deep forest.

We know that Mothers of God are never found inside mines, but inside caves. In spite of this, let me write about Sisyphus as if I wrote about the image that waits at the side-chapel for pilgrims. Every time we enter to see Sisyphus we become Sisyphus, we lose the now and the here and we are left in the inbetweenness which is tension. Sisyphus is the paradigmatic action: to reach the antipodes implies the possibility of reaching anywhere. To step on them does not mean to abandon or to exit, it has nothing to do with transgression. To step on them is to sail around, to go across infinitely, go round again and again forever, or at least, while any pilgrims are left.

Illogical, that is mythical, Sisyphus tautens the rope of all implicit space, immeasurable. And all space is trapped by Sisyphus in a time bubble, a comprisible time. A gigantic deed brought to human scale, but without miniaturizing it. A fact that tightens a knot in the net, a knot that is created everytime someone passes through and which rests undone until someone else arrives.

Simultaneous and necessarily incomplete Sisyphus is neither one nor the other, it is inbetween. If you deposit your faith in Sisyphus, nevermind it being blind because Sisyphus is trans(ap)parent.