from Mario Costa, La disumanizzazione tecnologica, Costa & Nolan, Milano 2007:

"It is the city in transition from the technical to the technological era, the city as described by Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman and Emile Verhaeren, the city on which Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Georg Simmel reflected. It is the city that  has produced the experience of shock and the metropolitan sublime distinctive features of modernity. It is these huge cities, the tangle of their innumerable relations that make photography and film conscious of their physiology at the very moment they reveal their own. But photography and film, the old media images, are now replaced by the new communication media. So we need to turn to neo-technological aesthetic products and to the relationships that the new media have now set up with towns and cities for a better understanding of the new nature of both. [...] One of Maurizio Bologninis works, Altavista (1997) replicated the Seattle police website, replacing the links to cameras positioned in various neighborhoods all over the city with links to other cameras located in cities across the world, producing a city that was impossible but observable in real time [...].The city becomes dematerialized, absorbed, swallowed up by the new technologies, and as such no longer exists. These experiments on the one hand show evidence of self-sufficiency, of the self-operating and self-reported nature of the new technologies, but on the other hand they also confirm a notion of the city as one of the territories of the general technologization of the world. [...] The city of which we speak is the continuation of the technological sublime onto the man-made plane; in other words, the old metropolitan sublime fades away, becomes part of the technological sublime and forms only one of its territories."
 

from Fred Forest, Art et Internet, Editions Cercle d’Art, Paris 2008:

"Au moment où la notion de lieu géographique a du mal à résister aux 'délocalizations', fragmentations ou disséminations tous azimuts des repèrer physiques, Maurizio Bolognini pointe la perte cet élément pourtant constitutif de notre identité. Avec Altavista, 1997, il s'agissait de répliquer le site web de la police de Seattle, en sostituant aux liens de web caméras disséminées dans les différents quartiers de la ville américaine d’autres connexions avec d’autres web caméras placées en différents endroits de différents villes du monde. Continuellement mises à jour, les images donnent donc à voir la perte du lieu et la dématérialisation de la ville post-modern, impossible à vivre quoique parfaitement observables en temps réel. Comme déjà Velasquez en son temps, les peintres avaient su dans le cadre délimité du tableau restituer les diverses orientations et dimensions de l’espace et Internet constitue une nouvelle expression de ce lieu sans lieu, au sein duquel l’espace et le temps sons soumis à des distorsions…"