“When you are three,
you lose your doll and forget your name.
At six, you forget to bring your lunch
and lose your freedom.
As a teenager, you lose your manners
and keep forgetting your beliefs.
Some time later, you can´t remember who you are and you lose your virginity.
In university, you keep loosing your house keys and forgetting the names of your lovers.

While still young, Hans forgot his reason
and lost his life.”

How do we keep from losing or forgetting our lives and histories? We start writing them in diaries, we collect them in our letters, we paste together photo-albums and newspaper clippings, we store them on floppy disks.

The practice in our society of searching, finding and collecting data and adapting it to one´s idiosyncratic needs is best exemplified by the web. This essentially re-defines the relationship of artist and audience.

The artist is no longer the messenger of a vision which he offers to an audience, rather she introduces an idea to a group of anonymous individuals and attempts to create the work in collaboration with them.
Our society is past the age of information and communication; it has entered the age of story-telling where the true story is the best story: it´s the one you believe. Still, one naturally seeks true history, original works, and distinguishes them from their counterparts: the myth and the copy. But in a world of storytellers, what´s the relationship between true and false, and history and myth and how does one tell them apart?
We believe one can address these questions in a web-based project more completely than one can in meat-space. Through our project we created a space to investigate these questions of truth and falsehood. We offered a place for On-liners to contribute their histories, myths, and truths, their lies and plagiarisms. Lucky Hans was a domain where people created meaningful on-line history.
Lucky Hans refers to the fairy-tale of the same name in which a witless young man trades a gold nugget down to nothing, yet still feels that he has come out on top, the lucky fool. Our Lucky Hans dies very young, forgets his photographs, leaves his mourning Christel behind, and remains lucky.
We created an interactive space where Hans´ and Christel´s story was joined by the on-liners´ own histories, beliefs and comments in form of still images, moving images, texts and sounds. Lucky Hans was devided into four main sections designated by the four cardinal directions of the compass. The sections linked on-liners´ contemporary personal histories to each other (the present), to our story (the past), and to facts and the unknown user stories (the future). Every time the on-liner input something, there was a change the story of Lucky Hans.
We were using such serious material, because we wished to elicit serious, thoughtful responses from the On-liners who visited our site. We were attracted to Hans´ and Christel´s photo album because it involved us in a very personal story from a period in history dominated by the drama of radical evil. We knew our audience felt the same involvement; we thought the product of their interaction will lead to a new and better understanding of the relationship between history, storytelling, and identity.