De digitale Stad (DDS)
«The digital City»

When the media art world's attention was drawn to internet art projects for the first time in the mid 1990s, one genre above all was the focus of interest: works that tried to establish a new kind of translocal, connected community on the World Wide Web. All four <virtual communities> that were creating a stir at the time were represented at ars electronica 1995: : «De Digitale Stad» (DDS; The Digital City) from Amsterdam, the «Internationale Stadt» (I.S.) from Berlin, «t0 Netbase» (pronounced: T Null Netbase) from Vienna and «The Thing» from New York. [...] In order to design the complex, multi-layered system so that users can manoeuvre instinctively, the «Digitale Stad» operates largely on the basis of the <city metaphor>. The <content> on the DDS server borrows from the evolved structure of the city of Amsterdam: there are <pleins> (squares) and <digital homes>, chat functions are called <cafés>, there is a special <cemetery> for people who have left the Stad and the police have even opened their own DDS station.

(source: Tilman Baumgärtel, in: http://duplox.wz-berlin.de/texte/tb/)