It is interesting to me how from the early experiments in telecommunications that media artists had been involved in exploring, have now come to forefront of everyday life.
In the early 80’s I was in Perth (the most isolated city in world) Australia, through visiting artists from Tom Klinkowstein and Roy Ascott , I’d discovered the ARTEXT network which enabled me to connect to a different dimension through the collapsing of physical space.
The ENMA has an interesting role to play in sharing with the community the story of the media artists role in exploring human interfaces with technologies.
I am keen to focus on the artists voice, seeking in-depth overviews of the area from the perspective of your own practice, but importantly in regard to the context of issues identified around individual themes. Who were the artists, academics, peers, theorists, technicians and facilitators that were influencing your practice and the problems you encountered with the ever-changing aesthetics and technological landscape?
Apropos…
Here for those interested is a record of the artist in residence program (including Bill and Simon’s marvelous works) that I initiated in ’92 at ZKM. I remember it as a special fortuity in place and time that was very pleasurably/productively shared with so many colleagues from the media art multiverse:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E70wN9eADfadpnzAUyGZVO1e9JdFzR0Q/view
Here in Hong Kong – I have another ten days of home quarantine after my recent return from Europe – with bleak news everywhere…
Best,
Jeffrey
In the mid/late 1980’s I was in Paris and visited a show at La Defence which featured work by Karen O’Rouke and Art Reseaux. Most of it consisted of large-scale interactive fax installations but one area was digital. They were taking images of visitors using a Mac Classic I think (one-bit monochrome – using pixel dither). These were taken and sent via slow-scan to other locations around the world who modified the images then returned them along with their own pictures.
That’s all I remember! There was a catalogue for this show and I think my copy is probably in the Patric Prince Collection at the V&A. Others on this list may remember more. Karen is still around if anyone would like to contact her?
Which reminds me to comment that there is a rich history to this kind of work including mail and fax art and I think Eduardo Kac has written about this?
My own experience is more pedestrian and commercial. Around 1984 I was contracted by Alan Bond (the same!) as part of a team creating a system to play live video on a 16 x 4-metre custom led screen on the side of one of his airships. A condition of the contract was that we all had email accounts and collaboration and reporting was all via email. We eventually used a stripped-down Fairlight Video Instrument together with a lot of specialised hardware. I did the programming, I can’t remember the name of the electrical engineer who designed and build all the trixy electronics but Alan Sekers of Imagine (and later Uni of the Arts, London) was the project manager. So a fairly early example of an international collaborative design project? I’m attaching a couple of pics.
An aside – my modem was 300/1400 (1400 up for fax) baud and we already had spam which was really frustrating and ate up both bandwidth and time. Also very few people had email back then so the main use was an email-to-fax gateway which enabled me to send and receive free faxes anywhere in the world.
All best to everyone – I hope you are keeping well in these troubled times.
Paul
Hi Kit
For me the work you and Sherry did was truly foundational. I still refer to it in my own research with distributed remote interactive immersive systems and my students are fully across the value and import of your projects and routinely refer to it in their literature reviews and the contextual information around their own research and practice.
best
Simon
More clutter folks:
Greetings all,
In reply the the age old assertion that SEND/RECEIVE was the “FIRST” interactive coast-to coast satellite network artists project “organized by “artists”.
It is known widely within and outside the artworld, as reported on Judy Malloy’s FB site for Social Media Archeology& Poetics, that the Galloway and Rabinowitz ‘Satellite Arts’ series of tele-immersive projects with NASA in 1977 was in fact the REAL first “artist organized” transcontinental transmission that began in July of 1977.
Our intentions of being the first to cross the threshold into a distributed, shared-screen, full-bodied co-occupied immersion using simple luminescence keying, into a composited intentional intervention to break down the traditional split-screen and become whole together (a first in the long conventions of remote TV and videoconferencing), to create our definition of the “Image-as-Place.” And without surrendering the emotional attributes of facial recognition (something our friend Jaron Lanier reports that VR still can’t do today). This all began in Paris in 1975 which we shared this, and our later ‘Hole in Space’ with the person that introduced Sherrie to Kit, who happened to be our mutual friend Felix Guattari.
After months of rehearsals with ethnic dancer from Anna Halprin’s dance studio, we embarked on a series scored-improvisational performance tasks that would insure that the performers maintained intense contact with each other without independently defaulting simply by hitting hitting their mark as in a stage performance. This was a measure if the co-occupational integrity that could easily be faked as appearing to be together as one. With reversed scanned monitors replicating real mirrors, not unlike the mirrored wall always used in a dance studio, surrounding the transcontinental performers that enabled the performers to maintain contact with each other even when they we not facing each other, as opposed to just one mirrored video monitor that would trap them by requiring them to always be looking out and forward in order to follow each other. This was a level of groundbreaking systems integration, and the first ever truly tele-immersive transcontinental performative aesthetic research that had never been experienced before distinguishing us above simply being end-users accessing existing technology like Douglas Davis, and our very good friend Nam June Paik that would seven years later use our satellite time-delayed feedback dance performance piece in Good Morning Mr Orwell while we were creating our 1984 Orwellian beyond-the-keyboard multicultural, multilingual, multimedia, telecollaborative network with the first key-word searchable text & PICTORIAL database that was the systems integrated tour de force called the Electronic Cafe Network that operating for seven weeks during the Los Angeles Olympics Arts Festival.
Anyway, the thing is that Paik failed to remember to reverse the scan on Merce Cunningham’s satellite feedback monitor, so when poor Merce hit the live TV broadcast stage (for his first time in time delayed cyberspace), when Merce moved his body to the RIGHT, his monitor image moved to the LEFT. Very disorienting and difficult to acclimate to, to say the least! But Paik couldn’t care less – after all he was a fluxust (SP?) artist first of all. After our July transcontinental performance tests that gave us the visceral knowledge needed to get our new cyberspace sea legs under us amounting to just a fractional second of satellite delay, and remember back then there was only one device that CBS had for sports instant replays as big as a refrigerator and cost two million dollars. No digital frame store devices existed back then to replicate the delay for rehearsals. We called the visceral experience “Thin space and thick time.”
By the time November rolled around we had become the first indigenous people of broadband tele-immersive cyberspace almost ten years before Scott Fisher would arrive at NASA Ames Research Center to begin developing goggles and gloves for computer rendered VR. So continued again for several days in November 1977 to the conclusion of the Satellite Arts project seeking the new genres intrinsic to the new ways of being in the world that we would continue to explore as social spaces rather than making artworks to be put into museums. Yes we dissidents and called ourselves Avantpreneur, who leaped ahead of the arts and industry because we were not willing to wait for 20 or 30 years to become just end-users. The SEND/RECEIVE cablecast was still thinking, like video artists mostly about broadcasting art and artists to what the French call tele-spectators. Yes, a couple of them, and some who were working with our project, were also beginning to considering the implications of symmetrical and reciprocal network that had been reshaping the world around them for the last hundred and some years, beginning with the 1858 transatlantic telegraph cable.
So, some of the participants of SEND/RECEIVE have been misinformed for over these 40 years about who was, as the old comedy skit asks: “Who’s on First?” S&K have never insisted on sorting out the truth in this matter because we didn’t care much. I even chased away a TV crew the turned up one day that wanted to make us the happy news segment at the end of their news program. I didn’t welcome the interruption and chased them away. I’ve seen it before, and would live to see it again. “Wacky artists are doing wacky things with a NASA satellite!” We knew what we were achieving, as did the constituency of artists, NASA, and technicians that became a part of our fascinating inquiry. Among them, to name just two, was flutist Paul Horn who came to experience playing within the latency and echo generated of returned satellite delay, just like he had been doing around the world exploring acoustic phenomena like he did with the acoustic qualities of the Taj Mahal. And David Rosenboom, former Dean of Music at Cal Arts, who jumped in and converted the radio telemetry signals generated by the body movements and gestures of the performers and assigned synth toned coming from the their small body monitors that were provided by the Stanford Children’s Hospital, and translating their movements into appropriately complementary cyberspace music.
So then, if this enterprise intends to produce an encyclopedia of fact, rather than fiction, I feel the need to set the record straight by informing the uninformed. And to go a step further, the legacy of our far more sophisticated interrogation of the latency, and the intrinsically challenging aesthetics, and the performative human-to-human inquiry, and the positive and negative implications of using geostationary satellites that at the time was the only means of moving live video across oceans, and that while not a desirable as future less latency under sea cables, was worth interrogating seriously while everyone else were just beginning to think about the pleasure of text, and exchanging faxes as a faster way to send mailart faster.
We profoundly transcended the conventional aspirations of the SEND/RECEIVE project as and it is recorded by many, and in particular, in the deep critical analysis and comparison of the two provided in Kris Paulsen’s telecom art book ‘HERE/THERE.’ Even though she got the July date correct, she and her MIT editor screwed up who was on the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California end, and who was on the NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC end. It’s really Liza Bear who propagated this myth out of her desperation to be say she was the FIRST! It would be her that informed SEND/RECEIVE participants that we came after. So frankly, I doubt that Jill Scott is at fault here for not knowing the truth.
Best regards,
K, of S&K
Dear all,
Apologies to those who find this exchange cluttering their email but I also cannot resist as its an opportunity to exchange information.
Jill, we must have crossed paths in San Francisco in the mid-1970s as my first artwork dealing with systems of classification and visual syntax, the “Catalog of Found Objects’, was exhibited at La Mamelle in 1975 in the “West Coast Conceptual Photographers” curated by Lew Thomas and Carl Loeffler. I also attended and received my MFA in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1976 signed by Roy Ascott who had just arrived (I had no idea who he was ;))!
Coming from a background of pictorial and conceptual large format staged photography through the late 1970s and early 1980s, I transitioned to software programming in 1981 because of a chance meeting at UCSD with the artist Harold Cohen who gave me full access to his studio and his DEC VAX system and Tecktronix 4010 vector display green screen running Berkeley Unix and C.
During this time I was visiting faculty in photography commuting from La Jolla to Cal Arts and I had to wait until 1985 to get access to the first available 16bit color imaging system for the personal computer, the Truevision Targa image capture board, so that I could produce “digital born”, software created, still photographic images. An additional fortutious opportunity in 1987 was getting access to 3 prototype high-color digital ink-jet printers produced by Fuji (but never went to market as the Iris printer came out later) that allowed to print 24” x 30” still images interpolated from 512 x 512 pixels image files.
The reason why I am describing all of this is I am looking for material, historical and theoretical papers and artworks, exhibitions, etc. that have addressed the intersections of still photography, conceptual art, semiotics and Information Theory, and the transitioning from analog to digital photography in the 1980s. This topic seems underdocumented, so if anyone has any references to these, I would greatly appreciate links, copies, etc.
George
Great that this is going..its a great read..so just to add a few more contributions.. here goes..
1977 La Mamelle ( A prominent Contemporary Art Space in San Francisco run by Carl Loffler) with a project by Sharon Grace. At NASA, in 1977, she was the west-coast artist/project leader for SEND/RECEIVE, the first interactive coast-to-coast satellite artist network. This was the inaugural event for artists to have a presence on the emerging Internet, I was there in the audience looking at how they used Slow Scan technology over the phone.. pre fax. She also did it with artists in the SFAI Lecture Hall and at the World Trade Center in New York create an interactive transcontinental performance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Grace#SEND/RECEIVE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mamelle,_Inc./Art_Com
1978. I was studying at the San Francisco Art Institute when Roy Ascott became the dean there. Terminal Art. For this project he used Jacques Vallée’s Infomedia Notepad System, which made it possible for the users to retrieve and add information stored in the computer’s memory. It would be good to involve him in this historical survey also the the other Telepresence works he made with Eric Gidney, Bob Adrian, Roy Ascot
1992-4. Saarbrucken Germany. We held a series of public events in the school, based on chat lines with the Informatics Department at the University of Saarland, Germany. We had about 6 public chat box events based on themes.
1996 ZKM: For the opening of ZKM I organized an online streaming event. Monika Fleishman was also there at ZKM for this. It was sponsored by the Media Museum. People in USA and Europe were also streamed in. It all happened in the foyer of Media Museum under the direction of Hans Peter Schwarz (another person to interview)
1998-2000 Bauhaus University Weimar. Here we made a series of online dinner events with open public invitations called FUSION. Three Universities were involved with Melinda Rackham at (COFA, Sydney), Victoria Vesna (UC Santa Barbara) and us at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. There were 7 of these events over 2 years. Malinda and I started a special project with Virtual Characters called Future Bodies, with programmed bots for Ms Rich, Ms Poor and Ms Perfect: all female characters you could chat online with about genetics. (see document in my book Coded Characters: Media Art by Jill Scott. Editor: M. Hahne. Press: Hatje Kantz, 2002)
It really nice to read all these updates, indeed, it seems that now in these new circumstances of imposed physical distance, it might be important to collect and re-think this history.
Such renewed interest might even open up more virtual events. Just this week Leonardo contacted me to be involved with all the other LASER CHAIRS to meet online for Global Virtual LASER workshops and the Third Space Network. The tech will be zoom.us and the results will be simulcast to Facebook and Youtube. We are going to see a real serge in social networking, I just hope that the 3 big Tech giants are not the biggest profiteers here
Cheers,
Jill Scott
Vera Frenkel’s String Games was an early example:
https://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/media.php?NumObjet=60325
In the mid/late 1980’s I was in Paris and visited a show at La Defence which featured work by Karen O’Rouke and Art Reseaux. Most of it consisted of large-scale interactive fax installations but one area was digital. They were taking images of visitors using a Mac Classic I think (one-bit monochrome – using pixel dither). These were taken and sent via slow-scan to other locations around the world who modified the images then returned them along with their own pictures.
That’s all I remember! There was a catalogue for this show and I think my copy is probably in the Patric Prince Collection at the V&A. Others on this list may remember more. Karen is still around if anyone would like to contact her?
Which reminds me to comment that there is a rich history to this kind of work including mail and fax art and I think Eduardo Kac has written about this?
My own experience is more pedestrian and commercial. Around 1984 I was contracted by Alan Bond (the same!) as part of a team creating a system to play live video on a 16 x 4-metre custom led screen on the side of one of his airships. A condition of the contract was that we all had email accounts and collaboration and reporting was all via email. We eventually used a stripped-down Fairlight Video Instrument together with a lot of specialised hardware. I did the programming, I can’t remember the name of the electrical engineer who designed and build all the trixy electronics but Alan Sekers of Imagine (and later Uni of the Arts, London) was the project manager. So a fairly early example of an international collaborative design project? I’m attaching a couple of pics.
An aside – my modem was 300/1400 (1400 up for fax) baud and we already had spam which was really frustrating and ate up both bandwidth and time. Also very few people had email back then so the main use was an email-to-fax gateway which enabled me to send and receive free faxes anywhere in the world.
All best to everyone – I hope you are keeping well in these troubled times.
Paul
—
Paul Brown
paul@paul-brown.com
Dear True Telematic people,
It’s been so good to get this emails and go down the memory lane!
My first encounter with the telematic embrace was when I was lucky to be able present my work right after grad school at the Aperto section in the Venice Biennale.
As fate would have it, Brian Eno was showing his installation next to me and at one point his professor walks in — Roy Ascott.
Roy was presenting his telematic work and honestly I had no idea what I was looking at, I did not have the language or the experience to even give it much thought.
But, it entered into my subconscious and soon enough I was collaborating on a first networked piece at SIGGRAPH ’92 ‘International Painting Interactive” IPI — before the web using ISDN.
A year later, I was again at SIGGRAPH, this time curated by Simon Penny (Machine Culture — historic show), and next to Christa and Laurent, with the Another Day in Paradise work, that was interactive but not networked. But, this is where
I first met and learned about the work of Kit Galloway and Sherry Rabinowitz – this time was so inspired that I pivoted all my work to net art installations starting with Virtual Concrete that
morphed into Bodies INCorpororated 1996 (using VRML) that became my PhD project (with Roy Ascott along with Bill Seaman). This was archived for later access
by Rhizome — you can see HERE. From there I moved on to exploring how to build a Community of People with No Time and continued to use the networking
aspects in all my work although not as central as it soon became deluged with corporate bodies…. Now we have no choice so here are — full circle back and what a world
wide web we are seeing now……. Let’s see if the system can withstand all Universities teaching online at the same time while people are watching Netflix and throwing
virtual parties at the same time!
Best wishes,
Victoria
p.s. IPI (Stephanie Slade from 3D animation company in Hollywood initiated this and I helped usher in the video artists. Quote from her:
“This was my dream project to create a network of artists worldwide working together collaboratively. 20 years later, I am producing The Global Peace Quilt. CNN reported on my IPI project and called it a World Wide Digital Canvas. It was 1992!!! I developed with programer/developer David Cook and my partner John Peterson an interactive paint system for use around the world to make the IPI work. I worked with artist and educator Victoria Vesna to locate and connect over 140 artists to collaborate over something we then called “The Portal”. This was way before the WWW peeps. My vision is still alive today!
Dear friends all over the world,
Wow, this is so historic, thanks for sharing these stories, this is so interesting !
In a few weeks I will teach a class on Telematic art and it would be wonderful if I can share a few quotes from your experiences below.
Would that be OK for you ?
With best telematic greetings
and long live the Global Village !!!
Christa
Ernest
Its a great thread. Thanks everyone. – someone might like to write this up………..
I was thinking the same thing.
Its such a hidden history – few artifacts, few documented events, the antithesis of ‘object’ art. But it ties many threads together. The connection with the dematerialisation (Lippard) and more general ‘conceptual’ ideas is often elided because of the disdain from some quarters for the ‘electonic toy boys’ as some used to call some of us.
Paul, how about pouring this thread into an editable onlien doce or simialr – it would be a great, jointly authored adjunct to the volume (imho)
Simon Penny
Its a great thread. Thanks everyone. – someone might like to write this up………..
for my contribution 1971 on –
My first concept was to build an art machine that facilitated a low bandwidth exchange between people, where the experience of that exchange was the art work. It was called Communications Game. Each participant used a “station” which had switches and lights and they were connected in a network. A participant’s switches influenced the lights of others on the network.
1971
The first Communications Game shown in the Invention of Problems II Exhibition at the City of Leicester Polytechnic. The work has six stations and there are three networks of three units.
1972
I constructed a second version that had three, rather than six, participants. It was show in the exhibition organized in Nottingham by Stephan Willats, Cognition and Control at the Midland Group Gallery.
1990
I built a new version in which each participant saw a screen rather than lights. The screen showed a sequence of images based on my Fragment computer generated video from 1985. The operations performed by participants changed the image sequence over a local area network. It was show in the Art Creating Society exhibition at (what was then called) the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.
2009
Extending the early Cities Tango, I started to make a series of works, called Cities Tango, that were distributed widely over the Internet. Images from remote location are dynamically shown within an otherwise abstract colour structure. The colours used and the pace of the work are influenced by a combination of the audience behaviours at the various locations. An early version was shown at ISEA2009, connecting Belfast to Sydney.
The work continues, now also using AR and smartphones.
Much of this history is described in a paper in Arts, with a few other refereences:
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/8/1/22/htm
Ernest
For those with some spare reading time…My PhD from CAIIA 1999 published later by VDM press! which discusses many aspects of The World Generator!
http://blogs.unsw.edu.au/amaha/files/2020/03/RPfor-sending.pdf
Best,
Bill
Hi Everyone! To continue on from Jeffrey…
Yes and The World Generator / The Engine of Desire – a virtual world generating system also facilitated a virtual video link inside the world with the ICC – Intercommunication Center, and ZKM! around that time and a few other places!
1998
The World Generator/The Engine of Desire • with Gideon May, Projection VR connected to ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany and Les Frenois, France • Portable Sacred Grounds VR connected to ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany and Intercommunication Center, Tokyo, Japan
1997
The World Generator/The Engine of Desire • with Gideon May, Projection VR connected to ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany and London, England •
IT Conference Exhibition VR connected to ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany and Brussels, Belgium
Dear Jeffrey – I can’t thank you enough on behalf of the many artists that did research in conjunction with showing at ZKM that you facilitated!
Best to all of you !
Stay safe!
Sincerely,
Bill
I am quite enjoying this exchange of early days experiences (and tussles) in the ‘connected’ world, and so let me add a few more of possible interest to this potpourri.
As soon as interactive CG became central in my art practice, ‘televirtuality’ and ‘telepresence ‘ were beckoning extensions; distributed spaces of representation where multiple separated subjects could interact with each other from remote and/or proximate locations
The technology we used was surprisingly adequate for the time. As I remember it these were modems over telephone lines to send the user interaction data back and forth, while all the graphics computing and display was handled locally (on SGI machines) at each site. Master coder Gideon May did all the application software development for this.
Televirtual Chit Chat 1993
Between ZKM Karlsruhe and Imagina Monte Carlo
https://www.jeffreyshawcompendium.com/portfolio/televirtual-chit-chat/
Telepresent Onlookers 1995
Cabled telepresence at ZKM’s Multimediale
https://www.jeffreyshawcompendium.com/portfolio/telepresent-onlookers/
Distributed Legible City 1998
Between ZKM Karlsruhe and ICC Tokyo, as well as other locations.
https://www.jeffreyshawcompendium.com/portfolio/distributed-legible-city/
Another distributed interactive artwork developed by Gideon May around that time was for Agnes Hegedus’s Televirtual Fruit Machine (1993), which operated between ZKM Karlsruhe and ICC Tokyo.
https://www.digitalartarchive.at/database/general/work/televirtual-fruit-machine.html
Conversations (2004) was a later technically more sophisticated distributed VR work that allowed three subjects to interact (with the content and with each other) in a hybrid mixed reality space of photography, cinematography and CG.
https://www.jeffreyshawcompendium.com/portfolio/conversations/
Best wishes and good health to all in these trying times (as I’m about take a vulnerable flight from Europe back to Hong Kong).
Jeffrey
Enjoying the email chain, very easy to forget those pioneering times!
Best Regards,
William
Hi Simon,
Sure, I remember the failed attempt to connect the two Caves. Very disappointing. Although at that time we had at GMD, as the German National Research Center for Information Technology (near Bonn), other possibilities than the Ars Electronica Center. Nevertheless, we had not expected this. With “Liquid Views” we realized a broadband connection for the transmission of live video between Ars Electronica in Linz and C3 in Budapest, 1998. It worked very well.
Today, in retrospect, I think Ars should have cooperated with the Austrian Telekom to connect the two CAVES. At ART+COM in Berlin, we have always cooperated with TELEKOM-BERKOM, the research laboratory of the German Telekom, and were considered the makers of their research laboratory since 1987. In 1990, we at ART+COM realized the first version of our “Home of the Brain” as a networked VR installation between two cities at the Telekom exhibition in Geneva.
Best to all of you from Berlin in contact ban times,
Monika
Not to forget Mona Hatoum’s slow-scan work at Western Front. A really wonderful use of the medium.
best
Simon
Hi Sean
It might be a three way (or more) relationship rather than a binary set of opposites. As an artist working with immersive and interactive media, interested in embodied as well as visual experience, the desk bound quailty of the early internet is why I couldn’t see its potential (in the 1980s it seemed like an expensive and complicated way to send a fax – as Mike suggests). At the same time the high tech and corporate driven developments in visualisation and FX, as represented at things like Siggraph, muddied the water for independent artists like myself. Firstly, I found the realism and bling of the type of ‘product’ you saw at Siggraph, and progressively on TV, artistically naive. But it was also confining, as it swept all before it and conditioned people’s expectations of media based visual art. So it was a a tri-polar set of antagonists for me. In the 90s I managed to work out how to incorporate the internet into my work, with projects like Great Wall of China (it’s all about ‘the messenger’, not the message). At that point it became more a binary as I never resolved how to deal with the high-tech side of computer graphics – indeed, my work has become visually and technically reduced over time, to the point it’s almost not there (seems that’s what’s happened to it out in the world as well).
best
Simon
At the Venice Biennale in 1986, we discovered that the impedance of the italian phone lines was different from the North American ones, which is one reason our modem connections failed in Salerno that year as well. Since Venice had NO technology at that time, they had to send a car to Milan to pick up some little impedance matching transformers so that we could connect. We had a steady convoy of cars going back and forth to Milan, because we kept finding things like this, and at each panic, a new courier was sent off by the organizers…
Then of course there was in the interactive piece I tried to do between Paris and Toronto on the morning of the October 1987 stock marker crash, or the one a year later where the generator for the major Sprint hub in Atlanta that we were relaying through was crushed by a traffic accident 2 minutes after our exciting run-through and 5 minutes before the doors opened to a crowd of 500…
Ah… the heartache!
Yes! I remember the slilliness of the transatlantic arm wrestling. Best telematic art joke ever.
10 years later, Goldberg did his telematic hand holding at my Machine Culture show ( SIGGRAPH93).
It was virtually impossible to get a decent modem connection between Italy and Canada,
Familiar story.
I tried to link two CAVES – GMD Sankt Augustin and Ars Electronica for Ars Electronica ’99, (Hi Monika!) – and we got the signal all the way to the front door of Ars Center with two rented dedicated T1 lines, but Ars only had a serial modem, so acceptable latency was impossible 🙁 It was a bitter irony. As a result we had to run Traces as a single site work. It was very disappointing.
Simon
I think that was ‘La Plissure de la Texte’. (can’t remember the exact phrasing) I was in art school at OCA, where Norman White was teaching, and I remember the reams of wide dot matrix printout spooling onto the floor.
My other early memories are of the Strategic Arts Initiative that Derrick de Kerkhove at the McLuhan Centre organized for the Aesthetics of Communication event in Salerno, Italy in 1986. Norman White and Doug Back had their telephonic arm wrestling going, Graham Smith was doing slow-scan, I was linking two very nervous systems across the Atlantic via 300 baud modem. It was virtually impossible to get a decent modem connection between Italy and Canada, so it was maddening, but it worked nicely between Paris and Toronto two weeks later
Yes – art and telecommunications – the artworld precursor of the internet.
I guess it was the same 1983, I was a sometime lecturer at City Art Institute in Sydney where Eric Gidney was the local node for Artext. I took part in events with Bob Adrian and Eric hooking up with – as I recall, Western Front, and Bruce Breland in Pittsburgh, and think Roy Ascott in UK, maybe Norman White in Toronto and a node in Vienna?. They were using the I P Sharp telex network and faxes mostly. Bruce has some slow scan video gear.
Its a long long time ago. But an important and usually forgotten moment in the history of media art – linking 60s art+tech with 90s media art. In a theortical sense, its more of continuity than ‘video art’ which is usually the block in the historical wall that fills that space, although there was of course endless crossovers – Aldo Tambellini’s slowscan video installations, the Vasulkas video harware hacking, Richard Kreische’s various projects – including a realtime telelcom performance with a societ cosmonaut in orbit, and so many others.
Simon Penny
if there’s room for origin stories . . .
my first experiments were with a massive room-filling device at McGill in Montreal where, by ftp, I swapped files with geographer Alan Mabin in Vancouver.. I promptly printed his file on a tractor-feed. This was a time-share system, and required us to communicate by phone to synchronise. A kind of very large, very expensive fax.
It was only at SEFT in London in the mid-80s that I met some of the folks round early community computing; got to see Quantel in action (and at the end of the decade worked briefly with Simon at Middlesex). Coming in from the video art scene, community arts and independent cinema, I was excited by what I saw, running to keep up – like most of the film critics and media activists I hung out with. Thatcherism crushed many of those aspirations: just as it created the conditions for the corporate infrastructure that would soon for the information economy (a phrase I recall Murdoch using about 1985 when he was buying Fox).
The distinguishing difficulty was the gulf between visual effects/immersive art on one side and networks on the other. I wonder if that isn’t still the case?
s
Thanks for the reply.
Tom came to Sydney in 1983 and as part of his trip visited me at Media-Space in Perth.
I put this up on my archive site. http://mass.nomad.net.au/australia-2003-event-april-1983/
He linked acoustic coupler to his typewriter, hooked it up to IPsharp and I was captivated.
Best Paul
I recently wrote the following describing my own work on telecommunications – 1970 on:
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/8/1/22
I can cover an angle on that in my chapter easily enough if that works for you.
Best (from the UK)
Ernest
http://www.ernestedmonds.com
Similar story Paul
visiting Roy Ascotts studio, Newport, Wales 1979, experiments in FAX
Own curatorial experiments with Fax performance – the IDA Agency project with Anne Whitehurst 1988
Early Video Conferencing in Vienna-Linz – Hilus (and moos) 1995
I tuned in to the excellent Gene Wildblood transmission with Michael Connor and Jerry (in this list)
very pertinent and worked well
can be re-visited here
https://livestream.com/newmuseum/expandedcinema
Tom Klinkowstein came to Adelaide at that time to give a slow-scan TV and TelNet workshop (this was 1982, I think, so before the Internet proper). Although that was my first use of what I think might be called the pre-internet it wasn’t my first introduction to networking. That was using an acoustic coupler over a conventional telephone line with a command line version of FTP (CPM, I think) in 1978 to move files between two computers that were 30 kms apart and too big to move (one was an IBM 360, the other a home-built S-100 Zilog based system). I didn’t think of it as networking, and I guess it wasn’t, as it was a P2P connection, like a traditional phone call. I didn’t start using the internet routinely though till the late 1980s. Strangely, as it would seem now, I couldn’t (as an artist) think of a use for it.
Simon Biggs
Professor of Art
Director: South Australian School of Art
University of South Australia