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Themesicon: navigation pathAesthetics of the Digitalicon: navigation pathAesthetic Paradigms
 
Cadaqués Canal Local (Muntadas, Antoni), 1974Two-Way-Demo; Send/Receive (Bear, Liza; Sonnier, Keith; Sharp, Willoughby), 1977Electronic Café International (MASA/Casino Container), 1992
 
Piazza virtuale (Ponton/Van Gogh TV), 1992
 

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The main object of interest at the time was to examine the methodologies and strategies that might enable the visions of telecommunication and ubiquity to be implemented in practice. In Spain, one of the first experiments of the kind was Antoni Muntadas’ project «Cadaqués Canal Local» (1974). Establishing a live connection between various artists at the two remote locations of New York and San Francisco, the live satellite transmission of «Two Way-Demo» in 1977, an action organized by a group led by Willoughby Sharp, Liza Bear, Sharon Grace and Carl Loeffler, was another interesting example.

Many Telecommunication Art experiments were concerned less with purely aesthetic results than with making innovative proposals for the development of different creative and social forms in handling new media. That was the objective of «The World in 24 Hours,» a project devised by Robert Adrian X for the 1982 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. In the view of Robert Adrian X such works surrendered their object character through being telecast, and so became «documentary traces of an action.» Other projects, such as «Electronic Cafe International,» developed by

 

Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz for the Olympic Arts Festival of Los Angeles in 1984, or «Piazza Virtuale» by the Gruppe Ponton/Van Gogh TV, attempted to intensify the idea of meeting and dialogue with and between the audience. Thus it is the audience that fluidly and interactively generates the ‹content› of the works. The lack of guidelines and instructions, of presenters and commentators, of completed scripts and concepts produced extremely dynamic effects. The intention of Van Gogh TV is to generate precisely these effects of non-linear and non-discursive production of information in order to create non-commercial, interactive television that is wholly separate from corporate systems of power or control. Thus, several functions are fulfilled by the users: they are simultaneously audience, contributors, and actors. This implies a double role as observer of the ‹spectacle› that is underway and as co-creator of the information. They are at once users and generators of the networks.

A representative number of telematic projects take into consideration the net-specific character of user participation, which largely likewise determines their

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