Altaplana, world of Francois Schuiten and Benoit Peeters

the impossible & infinite encyclopedia of the world created by Schuiten & Peeters

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Start of a new website

It was 15 years ago when Caspar de Wind and myself got the idea to start a website about the Obscure Cities. After some early searches on the Internet we couldn’t find any information on François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters work, so we decided to publish it ourselves.

Around June 1996 we started with the first pages of Web of the Obscure Cities and at the end of the year we finished our first story. With help of many friends we made French and English translations. Slowly the site grew, because all the coding was done by hand with just notepad. But the site was a success. We got many reactions. We got even reactions of Schuiten and Peeters, who we met several times afterwards.

Friday 28 June 1996

Dear Mr. Perdriel

A few days ago, François Schuiten and myself made a research in AltaVista (this name is very close to Alta Plana, which is a city in the Obscure Cities…) and we found your Web pages. We really are very impressed by the high quality of your work and the number of interesting documents that you discovered.

[… ] We thank you much for your marvelous work and your interest in our work.

Regards,

Benoit Peeters

And we got in contact with many other Obscure Researches. We met them on the first two Obscure Convention in Brussels and we gave them space on our server so they could make their own pages. Soon the EBBS.net site and subsites became the source of Obscure World on the Internet. Even the official site at Urbicande.be couldn't keep up with the constant stream of new information.

But time go by and lives changed. The fanatic group of researches were busy with their normal lives and the sites were not updated that frequently anymore. The EBBS.net site focussed on the latest news for the last years.

But without maintenance the information fades away. Links die, pages disappear. Time for actions to preserve the information on the Obscure Cities on the Internet. A couple of years back I got permission of Sylvain St-Pierre to turn his Dictionary in an interactive wiki. Over the years I tried many tools and stopped the efforts. Now I started again and won't stop again. There is a need for an archive of all the information produced on the Obscure Cities over the last years. Alta Plana, the Archive City will hold all the information once produced to save it for the future.

If time permits, please join and help me to make this site bigger and better!