I wasn't able to say anything about the cover artwork in the book itself so I wanted to pay tribute here to the great artist whose work appears on this book...

The cover of my book uses art by the Argentine-Italian artist and sculptor Lucio Fontana. As I say on the back of the book, Fontana produced a large number of works under the general heading "Spatial Concept" (concetto spaziale) in which he physically scarred or "hacked" the work to overcome the differentiation of the plane of the artwork and its surrounding physical context.

I chose this work, not just because of its name, but because it reflected a point in the book about cyberspace itself as being part and parcel of "our" world, and not some different plane of activities. Physical and cyberspaces are integrated. But it also undermines the map's traditional "separation" from the landscape and hints at its inseparable role in the generation of landscape.

Funnily enough, the design on this particular one looks vaguely like a hand holding a mouse! You might also detect a rather awful pun on "hacking"....!

Fontana started a group called the Movimento spaziale in 1947.