3.7.1 Roy Ascott connects to the world of telematics through an introduction to Jacques Valle via Brendon O'Regan, who worked with Buckminster Fuller before becoming the director of the Noetic Institute.[7] Valle, one of the pioneers of networked technologies, wrote a prophetic book in 1982, The Network Revolution, which inspired Ascott and other like-minded artists who were excited at the possibilities networks offer for creative work. Valle makes a claim in the book that the first attempt to create a group communication medium was the Berlin crisis and airlift in 1948 when an attempt was made to wire together telex machines from a dozen different countries, but with everybody trying to communicate in different languages, it did not work out. It was not until the 1970's, with the ARPANET finally taking off, that asynchronous, geographically-distributed group communication was accessible and possible. Valle was the director of Infomedia Net at the time and became interested in how artists may use this medium for creative work.

3.7.2 In collaboration with Jacques Valle's Infomedia, Roy Ascott organises a three week long event experimenting with the possibilities of telecommunication. Participants include Eleonor Antin of La Jolla, California; Keith Arnatt of Tintern, Wales; Alice Aycock of New York; Don Burgy of East Milton, Massachusetts; Douglas Davis of New York; Douglas Huebler of Newhall, California; and Jim Pomeroy of San Francisco. This is one of many groups of artists who will start gathering to communicate, exchange ideas, and collaborate on projects using telecommunication devices. (Large,P, 1980.) The following is Ascott's description of the event:

3.7.3 The object of the project is to explore computerised teleconferencing as an art form. There are no preconceptions of what this should or could mean. The process in entirely open-ended. You will be able to build upon or with the parts of the text, to play, speculate, construct, analyse, dissect, embroider . . . (Ascott,R. 1980)

3.7.4 This event marks the formation of a new cultural community composed primarily of artists interested in theorising the meaning of communication technologies. Displaced not only by the centralised gallery and museum systems but by their need to access and learn new technologies, they start meeting, exhibiting, and collaborating in international conferences. SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics organisation, becomes the prime place that allows artists to exhibit some of their experiments and equally important, gain access to the companies that produce the technologies. The established art world became intrigued by artists working with networks, which is evidenced by the organisers of the prestigious Venice Biennial inviting Roy Ascott, Don Foresta, Tom Sherman, Tomasso Trini, and Maria Grazia Mattei to present their Planetary Network and Laboratory Ubiqua in 1982. But just as with video, this kind of work did not really fit into the art market and thus remained on the periphery of interest and critical attention for many years. [top]

Notes:

7. Ascott describes the circumstance of his meeting with Brendon O'Regan as very funny: He gave a tarot reading to his secretary who was having a an emotional breakdown; somehow the word went out and he needed up on a TV show produced by Alan Neuman and hosted by Burt Lancaster about psychic research. The director of the newly forms Noetic Institute, O'Regan was there, bringing along the Brazilian psychic, Gasparetto who created psychic drawings using his hands and feet. Roy was invited as artist from academia to talk to himŠ (From a personal communication with Ascott, December, 1998) [back]