.....The Project Solar Eclipse '99 seeks to understand the following: Firstly, whether it is possible to leverage the Internet for cross-cultural exchanges between communities spread across different countries with different cultures.
..... And in order to enable truly meaningful cross-cultural exchanges could we create design-technology tools that would allow the communities not just to connect up but to 'collaborate' with each other over shared ideas and intentions preferably through pre-designated tasks across pre-designated time periods?

.....The Project derives its name from a complete solar eclipse predicted for the 11th of Aug'99, whereby, the first land mass on the straight line of the Eclipse's trajectory is going to be Cornwall, UK and the last land mass India. Thereafter, the whole phenomenon will disappear into sunset over the Bay of Bengal. .....Consequently, the Project has been conceived as a shared initiative between Cornwall's Falmouth College of Arts (FCA) and India's Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay.

.....This Indo-UK initiative had started off in early 1998 with the avowed intention - exciting and ambitious as it was and continues to be - of being able to create, by the time of the Eclipse, a "daisy chain" of communities along the line of the Eclipse's trajectory that should be able to connect up with each other through the networking technologies in order to collaborate and work with each other synchronously (online) and asynchronously (offline) over their shared visions, ideas and ethos across the Internet.
..... In the process, it has been our fond hope to be able to create "new art, new audiences and new experiences" through all this collaborative work centred around a set of design- technology initiatives inherent to this new media.

.....In the process of testing the above mandates, we have created a set of websites revolving around each of the 'events'. The websites have been informed by an overall plan of action that seeks to include within the web one or more of the following web components - each one progressively more sophisticated in its scope as a step towards increased human communication and interaction.
..... The different layers for our websites are as follows: (i) an information site to brief the viewer or participant about the 'event' or the subject matter at hand, moving on into
(ii) introduction of interactivity in order to make the information-component more interesting and animated and therefore more effective, moving on further into

.....Secondly, it has been and it continues to be our intention to include within the folds of this new media technology, more numbers and more categories of "new audiences" - a term coined by us to indicate technologically-vulnerable groups of users. This would include the so-called "technology-illiterates" that we think could continue to remain detached from the computer-mediated technologies in the conceivable future. "New audiences" for us would include user-groups such as street children, artists, calligraphers, artisans, housewives, the fisher folk, dyslexics and so on.
.....The crucial question, therefore, would be: how can the Internet technology be made to transpose itself onto the everyday spaces of the generic 'everyman'?