At first glance the installation "Blind's World I," part of the Knowbotic Interface Project, seems to be a kind of network-based computer game: In a multicolored icon-world one notes creatures (Knowbots and Pseudoknowbots) trying to survive. The need to search for nourishment makes them explore their environment. Their orientation depends on hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting. The sensory perception of seeing is left out on purpose. All creatures of "Blind's World I" are indeed blind. A Pseudoknowbot represents the virtual body of a human body and acts like a Knowbot in the virtual world, though in reality it is directed by a user.

A Knowbot (= to know + robot) is an autonomous computer program which has a virtual body like a Pseudoknowbot but is additionally equipped with an artificial consciousness, enabling it to acquire certain skills, such as learning natural languages. For the time being this ability is limited to sentences consisting of up to two words, such as those uttered by little children in the process of learning a language.
This artificial consciousness turns "Blind's World I" into what it really is, a philosophical experiment, linking modern philosophical research and state-of-the-art computer technology and computer software with each other.

Summing up, one may define the Knowbotic Interface as a network-based software kit for simulating structures of self-consciousness, especially structures that one day should be fully capable of learning and applying natural languages.

In spite of the intensive use the project makes of computers provided with most recent software technology (object oriented programming, distributed objects, AI technics, 'smart' algorhythms), it is neither simply a software project nor an AI experiment, but first and foremost an experiment imbedded in recent philosophical theories concerning the nature of self-consciousness. Apart from making possible the definition of different structures of consciousness, this program also allows testing of their effects on such things as the formation of terminology, thinking, planning, language acquisition, and language application. It is based on a formal theory of self- consciousness, that is firmly grounded in philosophy.