Hermit crabs are families of crustaceans that make their homes and shelters in the unused or abandoned gastropod shells of snails and mollusks. Unlike other crustaceans, to whom they are related, hermit crabs do not carry their houses with them. They live in the discarded shells of other crustaceans, when they outgrow a shell they abandon it and find another. In this project, I wanted to be a hermit crab on the World Wide Web, to work in existing sites and spaces. This was not conceived as a pirate or graffiti project as such, I wanted to occupy spaces and work within existing frameworks that allowed for occupation and modification. After working on the project, I realized the site of this project was not individual web sites but the system of information dissemination itself – the routing of information through international server routes and the actual physical routes of the internet - the fibre optic cables, submarine cables and communication cables that constitute the material base of the Internet. The home site or page of this project is a terrarium, located in Montreal, the home of a real hermit crab, Pookie*, whose explorations of his own habitat become the basis for the viewer's explorations in cyberspaces. *Pookie is an arbitrary unit of measurement used in cyberspace. Ingrid Bachmann is an interdisciplinary installation artist and an occasional writer and curator, whose interests span obsolete technologies and new digital media. Currently she is researching emergent behaviours in embodied systems and networks from the field of Artificial Life as models to create generative and interactive artworks. She is the co-editor of Material Matters, a critical anthology of essays that examines the relations of material to culture. Presently, she is the Graduate Programme Director, MFA Studio Arts at Concordia University. Philippe Blanchard is a film and new media graduate of Concordia University. From 1998 to 2000, he has worked in film in Cuba, shot documentaries in Egypt and designed for the web in Ecuador. He has spent the last 2 years freelancing as a web designer and cinematographer for film and video in Montréal, working with local artists, filmmakers, small businesses and community groups. Philippe Blanchard designed and programmed the Digital Crustaceans website, the Science Fair Historical Timeline, as well as the Science Fair home page. Geoffrey Jones, technical consultant Technical Requirements: High speed connection recommended Monitor resolution above 800x600 Flash 5 + Quicktime 4 plug-ins IE3/Netscape 3 or higher