Chapter 2: Emergence of Telematic Culture

  Software makes none of the usual qualitative distinctions between the artistic and technical subcultures. At a time when esthetic insight must become part of technological decision-making, would such divisions make sense? (Burnham 14)  
In 1970, Jack Burnham curated an important exhibition, Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, at the Jewish Museum in New York. The theme was a sequel to the equally pioneering exhibitions in 1968, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Cybernetic Serendipity at the London Institute of Contemporary Art. Software was the first exhibition of art and technology in a museum context, thus providing an opportunity for artists to comment on their changing relationship to the institution and to the audience. The exhibition included works of art by conceptual artists, including Les Levine, Hans Haacke, and Joseph Kosuth. These works were exhibited beside displays of technology, including a hypertext system designed by Ted Nelson and a computer-controlled model of interactive architecture by Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group at MIT. Ted Nelson acted as a technical advisor and helped artist Agnes Denes with programming for her piece called Triangulate Your Thoughts (Burnham 27).

Conceptual artists such as Levine and Haacke believed in the equivalence of communication media and the production of artwork. They also felt that artists should use whatever materials and techniques are necessary in order to respond systematically to contemporary social issues and their wide range of informational contexts:
  The artist's business requires his involvement with practically everything . . . It would be bypassing the issue to say that the artist's business is how to work with this and that material . . . and that the rest should be left to other professions . . . The total scope of information he receives everyday is of concern. An artist is not an isolated system . . . he has to continuously interact with the world around him . . . (Haacke 52)  
E.A.T. and exhibitions such as Software clearly show that artists and curators were actively exploring ways to work with technology and reconfigure how the established art world works in conjunction with the role of the artist and the relationship with the audience. And as artists began to look at telecommunication technologies as an interesting territory to explore, an entirely new telematic culture began to emerge. The history of telematic culture really begins, however, in 1957 when the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth. At the height of the Cold


figure 1: Drawing of the first connection.
War, the United States responded instantly to Sputnik by forming the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the department of Defence (DOD), an organization meant to re-establish the lead in science and technology. Thus telematic and computer culture emerged out of the war machine and remain directly connected to it more than any other art form to date.

In 1962, scientists from the US Naval Observatory Time Service (USNO-United States) and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL-United Kingdom) deployed Telstar, the first active-mode communication satellite, to complete the first transatlantic two-way clock comparisons. That same year J.C.R. Licklider and W. Clark published a paper on a "Galactic Network" concept encompassing distributed social interactions, and Paul Baran proposed a new system of network design for sending computer messages, following up on the first paper published on packet switching written by Leonard Kleinrock the year before. Eight years later, in 1969, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency NETwork) was born, and four nodes were established: University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); Stanford Research Institute (SRI); University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB); and University of Utah. In 1967, The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, UK, developed an NPL Data Network under D.W. Davies (Zakon, Hobbes')