3.6.1 In 1979, twenty years after Sputnik was launched, two significant artistic projects mark the beginning of artistic experimentation with communication technologies that allowed interactive, two-way collaboration. Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp in New York and Sharon Grace and Carl Loeffler in San Francisco organise "Send/Receive," which employed a CTS satellite and featured a fifteen-hour, two-way, interactive transmission between the two cities. Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, in conjunction with NASA and the Educational Television Centre, Menlo Park, California organised the world's first interactive composite image satellite dance performance between performers on the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of the United States. The performance included the first time delay satellite feed-back dance, three-location, live-feed composite performance, and flutist Paul Horn playing his time echo. In 1984 they establish the Electronic Cafe, which is now based in Los Angeles and still active. [6]

3.6.2 The following year, in 1978, Bill Bartlett organises more ambitious satellite collaborative projects between the Open Space Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia and artists in nine locations in the USA and Canada. In 1979, Bartlett, together with Peggy Cady, Penny Joy, and Jim Starck, launches the Pacific Rim Identity, which includes artists from Cook Islands, Papua (New Guinea), New Zealand, Australia, Alaska, New York, and Toronto. This was a first step towards moving away from the centralised art world that focuses on Paris, London, and New York and an attempt was made to introduce artists from remote areas in the world into the discourse. (Ascott, Loeffler, ed. 1991) 3.6.3 The pioneering work in telematics was still based on real-time connections and projections of events in physical spaces. It was not until 1980 that a more conceptual approach was attempted by Roy Ascott, who very quickly moved towards asynchronous event organisation. [top]

Notes:

6. The Electronic Cafe is still a vital operation. They have venues all around the world. For more information, see: www.ecafe.com [back]