The name is borrowed from Paul Auster's novel City of Glass where Daniel Quinn is paid to follow Peter Stillman Senior through the streets of New York City. At first Quinn is focusing on Stillman's behavior on a "street scale" level: mainly what kind of junk he is picking up from the ground. After a number of days, Quinn becomes increasingly hopeless until he starts sketching the movements of Stillman from a birds eye perspective. Each day's walk seems to have spelled a letter, mapped out by the grid system of the streets of Manhattan, and the letters seem to spell out words. Only when Quinn maps his information differently, does it become meaningful.

As wanderers, surfers or minglers in hypertexts (the World Wide Web) we create trails or paths that intersect and intertwine, conveying a "story" that has neither authors nor spectators. The Stillman Projects are parasitic art-systems utilizing the memory of the Web. This memory is the, before only imagined, stories of the ghostlike traces (broken twigs, trails, garbage etc.) in a forest by the anonymous hikers before you. The assumption is that on the Internet anyone can assume any of a multiplicity of identities - identity as liberation. But what is identity worth when everyone could be anyone? We are not experiencing the multiplication but rather the fragmentation of identities. Is this breakdown of identity a Millennial nightmare? No, the opposite, it means we're not alone anymore...

[ ] Net.Art Sketch 1.0 - Brett Stalbaum

Easily draw pictures 2880 miles wide by 1755 high.

[ ] The map of the terrain- the terrain itself - Benjammin Eakins

Documentation of an installation in October 1998