 The next talk will be about telecommunications art of the 1980s. And please give a warm welcome to Josefine Bosma. Thank you, Axel. Axel forgot to give you my full introduction. I actually made him wear high heels once in an Amsterdam hacker space. So thank you for introducing me, Axel. Lovely to be here, lovely to talk to you. I'm going to talk to you about an ongoing research project. My voice sounds very strange to me, so I hope you can understand me in the room. You can, quite well. Excellent. So... Let me... This is just my introduction slide. First, let me do the... Maybe the most boring bit of this, which is that this project is part of... something that has been coming up the last years, which is digital art preservation. This is a very tough area of research, of development... in which all kinds of things are being looked at to preserve art from the 1990s, especially. But we can say that a lot of art from early computer networks has already been lost. And one way that we are looking at it recently, or that people have been looking at it recently, is by looking at it from the perspective of reenactment, which is basically not... keeping the work completely the way it is, but trying to make it a new, as it were, to see how you can make it in present-day circumstances. And this is what we are going to do with this art project from 1982, which was largely performance-based, process-based. So most of that... And it was huge, as I will show you. So most of that is very hard to reproduce. I'm very sorry if I sound a little wobbly, because the sound to me is really, really weird. I'm hearing a lot of echo, and so this is hard for me to focus on. Let me first tell you about what my personal interest in this project is. So I started doing interviews with artists around 1992, 1993, and in 1993 I met the first artists working with the Internet. To me, that was a completely new discovery. I didn't know anything about it at that point in time. And for me, the Internet was a new thing. In 1993, I also saw the first web art projects. But what happened at the same time, I was really, really lucky to be introduced to this man here, Robert Adrian, whose project we are talking about today. And he was introduced to me by Alex Adrianse from V2, which is now in Rosendem, a Dutch electronic art institution. And he said, this is Robert Adrian. He had the first artists mailing list in 1980. And I was like, what? Artists mailing list in 1980? How is this possible? The first artist computer network back then? I didn't even know there were computer networks back then. But apparently there were. And so this is what we will be... Well, that's this personal connection to me. I'm the one sitting here with the long hair. That's me. I was very lucky to find this photo on the V2 website when I was preparing this talk. So, on with that. So this artist network was called Art Box at first, when it was made in 1997. And then a bit later it was turned into something called Art Text. And this is the people that were all on that mailing list back then. So this is the who is of that mailing list. I found another one from 1986 that has a few more people on it. But so you can see here that the mailing list was mostly people from the USA and from Canada, but also from Europe. There's Amsterdam, there's Austria, there's Belgium, Brussels, somebody there. There's also Australia, Paris, David Garcia, that is somebody who was in Amsterdam. Well, you can see it for yourself. The project that we're talking about today... That is this one that happened in Ars Electronica in Linz in Austria in 1982. The world in 24 hours actually also had somebody from Japan. And I have no idea how they got this person involved. So as I said, this is an ongoing research project. So also for me, there are a lot of gaps and a lot of things I don't know yet. But at the same time, so I'm researching it. But I'm also at this very moment talking to you, trying to find people who will think with me and who have maybe ideas of how to reenact it, or who would be interesting for me to give me more information or to collaborate on a possible reenactment of this project. So the world in 24 hours. What they did at Ars Electronica is they had a schedule... which... to cover all the participants in different time slots. Because, of course, you can imagine the world in 24 hours, that means that not everybody is going to be up at the same time. So there are different time zones and the schedule took that to heart. So everybody could be there in their prime moment, as it were. Different elements of the project. These are the technological elements here, first and foremost. Of course, there's the social network as well. We'll be talking about that much a bit further down. So the heart of it, technologically, of course, the very heart is the artists and the social network. But the technological heart was the IP-sharp message system, the Milbox system. This IP-sharp was a time-sharing company that had mainframe computers all over the world, where other companies could hire time on to communicate with their associates and people from all over the world. So I don't have a slide from the IP-sharp network in there, but I'll be talking about this network a bit more later on and the relevance to this project. Then in this particular project and in other projects that were arranged via the RTX Milbox system, they used mostly a portable terminal, computer terminal, with a thermal printer inside for the exchange of artworks. So they would send text-based works. This would be just communication, this could be poems, this could be all kinds of things that was part of the individual artists' projects. And it would be printed out and read on the radio or it would be hung in the event space. So then there's the SlowScan TV. I will be talking about more or less each element of this project along the way in this presentation. SlowScan TV, I will show you a little clip. You saw some of it when we were testing the audio. In fact, I don't have a lot of examples. I'm just going to fly through most of this project and just give you a general idea of what it was about and a bit of a feel. And telephone audio, well, that speaks for itself. It could be voice, it could be music, played through telephone lines. And an important aspect to me is also that something that happens in these early, especially these early network performance projects, is that they were not solely online. It's very important that you see these computer networks as something that connects spaces, that connect people, that connect events, that make things happen. And so you could, I don't know if you know these, this is a famous Tim Berners-Lee drawing, I think, of the network as he saw it, where you see three different images. And the last one is the network with all these spider web things coming out with the different nodes that are connected. And that's how you should see this, is every node, every performance space that was connected in this particular project was connected socially at the site that it was in, in the city that it was in, and people would come there and do their own things. So even if every site, there was mostly one artist that was in charge, different artists would come and perform music or whatever. And there was also the occasional telex performance in this project. Now, this was a slide from Robert Adrian's website. You can actually look it up if you look for Robert Adrian, the world in 24 hours, you will find his website with a lot of pictures from the event in Linz in Ars Electronica. This is a picture which said fax machine being prepared. And I was really confused by that because I didn't think, I didn't see, I thought, where's the fax machine? But of course, in my mind the fax machine is this little thing with a telephone and a printer that you put things in and something comes out. But in those days, fax machines have actually been really clunky things. And I didn't realize that until I saw this one here that from around the same time. So fax machines and Xerox machines were related. And they were fax machines were sort of connected Xerox machines, basically. So artists would send pictures through them. And they were seen actually as the first communication platform for artists, the first communication network, because it was so visual, the fax network. And here you see on that wall faxes from Tokyo, middle from Frankfurt, and this is Vienna, that is from, was organized by Kazua Kobata, a dancer and a curator. The middle is from Thomas Bayerler. He is now a famous video artist. This Vienna was organized by Helmut Mark. I've interviewed most of the people. I haven't been able to track down or get an email address for Kazua Kobata. If anybody can help me with that, that will be wonderful. But so what Helmut Mark said, he was close to Robert Adrien, is that this project was mostly about creating a communication network for artists. And this is something I haven't mentioned to you yet, but this is really important. As you can imagine, in the 1980s, in the 70s, in the 60s, television radio was highly regulated. Even telephone lines were super, super costly. To communicate with each other was difficult, to have a platform that reached beyond the local space was difficult to have. So in that sense, artists creating these networks for themselves is very much related to media activism. And, well, that is why this project, the artists, if you interview them, also if you talk to the widow of Robert Adrien and I talked to Robert Adrien several times, this was very much a communications project. This is very much about creating a network for artists. And this is an example of one of the faxes that was sent from Vancouver by artist Hank Bohl. And I now move a little bit further to the slow scan television. Slow scan television, you probably know most of from the images that were sent from the moon. I think NASA was the prime user of this particular technology. And we have a few of these machines that were used for it, to create some, in a possible reenactment. And so we have the Robot 400. In the performance they used the Robot 530. These were transceivers, as you call them. And at that time these things were illegal. They were illegal in Austria, where the performance, or the heart of the performance was. So it was smuggled into the country with the luggage of a diplomat. I want to read an excerpt from an email from Helmut Mark. This was the guy who coordinated the Vienna bit to give you a feel for the time, to give you a feel of what it was like to do anything at that time. After we used telefax and computer connected to the IP sharp network, the main problems were in organizing telephone lines. For both our systems we needed a line each, which was at this time, especially in Vienna, not easy. At that time there were, based on the lack of resources, still so-called Fiertel Telefone. Neighborhood telephones. That means that four users who did not know each other shared the same line. Therefore they were not able to call at the same time. So this was one technological difficulty, which was next to all kinds of financial difficulties of using these telephone lines, because they were also hugely expensive. I want to quote another one before I... Because I tend to run over time sometimes. No, I don't. I'm going to read another one from... This is a quote that I found on a website about the APL programming language, which was at the base of this mailbox that the IP sharp company used. And so this is about this mailbox. IP sharp, Ian Sharp from this company writes, A constant source of irritation was the universal attitude of all telephone companies to the idea of electronic mail. It was regarded as a huge threat to the considerable income that they had derived from Telex traffic. Telex was an ultra low-speed communication system among teletype terminals. The service was introduced in the mid-1940s as a solution to all corporate data transmission requirements. No significant improvements or upgrades were made to that server over the next 30 to 40 years. The first real threat came with the advent of electronic mail. Or at least that was how electronic mail was perceived. The first reaction of any monopoly to a perceived threat is to ban it outright. And that is more or less what the telephone companies did. We never did succeed completely in allaying suspicion. And many phone companies were sure that we were eating their Telex lunch even though they had no evidence of it. As a gesture of goodwill, we modified our email software so that it was no longer possible for any customer to communicate with another. But that was largely a waste of time since they did not really believe that we had done that. So you had to always communicate via the central servers, via the BBS built-in board sort of system. Rather than connecting directly to somebody else. So they didn't believe that they had fixed that. In Germany, the Bundespost invented a tariff which they said we must apply to all emails and send them money each month. Since we did not have revenue from electronic mail in Germany, we never sent them their share and eventually the issue at Trafeed. It was of course the proliferation of computers and private corporate networks which caused the erosion of Telex use. More and more people started to use electronic mail and the telephone companies were simply overpowered by the tidal surge of individual as well as corporate usage. So that's just some anecdotes from the 1970s and 1980s of this time. This is an example of one of the artists using this slow scan TV in connection or together with the fax. So what you would see also, because I've now, when you hear about this project for the first time, you may think that, oh, one artist is doing fax or one artist is doing telephone audio, one artist is doing slow scan TV. Now most of the time they would do all of it at the same time during their time slot. So it was really a sort of media ecstasy that would be going on. So this one is sending this semaphore sign language and sending a message via slow scan TV at the same time with this system. Then another system in San Francisco is doing a more autobiographical project that fits in his own work where he, what did he do? The video text is text from advertisements between the year of my birth, 1950, and between 1982 the year of the performance taken from popular American magazines. So, and this was, besides broadcast via this slow scan TV transmission, it was also sent, here it's at least that's what he claims, on a cable channel in San Francisco. So it was also broadcast on television. So this is another bit that I have to check if that really happened. Then it was also connected to PSAT to very early stages. I think this project started in 1982. This was the way that the Pacific Island, Pacific Region Islands would be connected before the internet was really established. They would have the satellite uplink. And there was an exhibition in 1982. Here you can see exhibition of art from the Pacific Region in Honolulu. And the guy opening, this is a picture from the opening speech from the director, a given, and it's presented through slow scan TV. This is guys, this is just a picture that I found on the internet because it was almost impossible to find any pictures, well actually I didn't find any pictures from this time. I have been in touch with John Southworth, but he's now in his 70s and he doesn't want to tell me anything about the past. He says he's forgotten most of it, I don't believe it, but you know, when somebody just shuts you down, you just shut down. Anyway, this is the video I wanted to show you, to give you an impression of how slow scan TV worked. And in it you see a bit where they connect the stuff to the inner part of a telephone. This is a year later. Vienna and Vancouver were connected by two telephone lines, one to carry sound and the other to carry video. This is Robert Adrian. Video moves along the telephone line by means of slow scan. The slow scan robot grabs a frame of video every eight seconds and digitally encodes that still image into sound. The similar machine at the other end of the telephone line decodes that sound back into an image. It takes eight and a half seconds for each image to form itself over the previous one, hence slow scan. The slow scan picture is coming through. OK. Albert? Yeah? OK, let's start. Hang over on. OK, yeah. So here you see a lovely example of, this is the end of the tape, actually, of how these networks were connected to local events. So The Haters was a noise band from San Francisco, which performed here in Vancouver. I want to talk a little bit about the Ipsa network, so that's the IP-sharp network connection. How that happened, I saw, God, I'm really running, I'm going overtime. Anyway, it doesn't matter. There was somebody in Canada, Robert Bernacke, who worked for the IP-sharp company, who was really interested in having artists play around with this technology that he was working with every day and that he loved so much. He thought it was fantastic. He was really fascinated by it himself, and he invited the artist Norman White, who was already doing all kinds of robotics art, and all kinds of electronic art, to come and have a look at it. Norman White came to the IP-sharp office and saw all these wonderful big mainframes and what it could do, but actually, there was only one thing in it that he found really fascinating, and that was the smallest bit, which was the message system, so the mailbox system, that was really what got his attention. And it was then used for the first online artist conference in 1979, which was the main hub, was in San Francisco at the MoMA there. This is what the IP-sharp office looked like, or one of them, probably the headquarters. This is a picture from an IP-sharp founder, Roger Moore, his name is, just like the James Bond actor. He has wonderful documentation of everything, of all this time online, if you want to look for it. So I put a picture of, you know, a sort of promo picture of the same computer that they used here to see the actual colors, because the picture is a little bit dark. So this is a picture of the portable terminal that was used in the performances, and as you can see, it has this paper that goes in there. And this is how it was used by one of the artists, who was also, well, by all the artists, but this is one of the artists that is also in the performances, quite a famous media artist by now, Roy Ascot, he also won, I think, a Nica at Ars Electronica for his entire work. So you see these really long pieces of paper that are coming out with all kinds of texts. Here's a picture of how it was used in the world in 24 hours. This is the work of David Garcia and Annie Wright. They had something of a fake media or newspaper project going on called Late Times Extra, and it was printed out, and people are reading it right there on the wall. This is a connection to Florence, which was with Zona, which doesn't exist anymore. It was an artist's initiative that did all kinds of things and also ran a radio station, Radio Zona. And so this was a collective, and you can imagine that the different things that did there was really... well, very varied. This is the only Talex connection I think was in the project by another very interesting artist group called Minor Delta Stee, Karl Duduchek, Mike Hens and Bernard, I forgot his last name, who at that time had something called the Bangkok Project, where they dragged physically a stone from Stonehenge to Bangkok. And because nobody believed that they actually did that, they sent messages and photos and audio from all over the trajectory that they did this, and also in Istanbul. When they were in Istanbul, they sent a Talex to the world in 24 hours, and they also sent some audio for this project. The interesting part of this disguise, Minor Delta Stee, also David Garcia, who I showed earlier who was in Amsterdam, is that they were so influenced by these 1980s telecommunications art projects that they set up really big telecommunications or network art projects in the 1990s. David Garcia started the Tactical Media Initiative, or started the Tactical Media Festival in Amsterdam called Next Five Minutes. And these guys, Karl Duduchek especially and Mike Hens, they did the Van Gogh TV project together with Ponton Media Lab from Germany. I don't know if you know anything about that, but in 1992, they connected various European cities, local TV stations, and developed special software where you could phone in with your telephone. You could use the dial on your telephone to control images on your television screen. So, rounding off this, the social basics of World 24 Hours were very important, as I said before. So, for Robert Adrian, he very much thought that art, after the coming of computer networks, art in the digital age was different from before. He said, we live in a post-industrial society now, and there is no more product, there is no more art product. It is all about the process, it's all about engaging, it's all about communicating and collaborating. He also believed that the artist was not, he saw himself not as an author, but as a facilitator, as somebody working together. Adrian was very influenced by the conceptual artists from the 1970s, but he saw this also as the Ten of Communications Art Project, as something coming very much from the male art tradition, where artists also created their own networks, and also even created their own stamps, and would find ways to sort of hack the postal system by using their own stamps and so on. So, what I find interesting about the World in 24 Hours, and all these projects, is that most of them, especially the World in 24 Hours, because Robert Adrian was the lead artist here, all the different participants, all the different collaborators, would just latch on with their own project. So, it was really very much like here at Schaar, though everybody has a main interest, which is building this camp and making something good happen here, everybody has their own projects, and connects them to other ones. And last but not least, the artists and the technicians were seen as equal, so in interviews that I've done with both Robert Adrian and Heidi Grundmann, this is an important factor, that artists sort of become technicians, and technicians sort of become artists. So, there's a sort of leveling of roles. Now, my next step is, after doing the research, I'm sort of doing an overlap between my research and trying to develop the next step, or going to the next step, is what to do with this, how to take this further, because as I said, this is a project from 1982 that was one of the first network art projects, computer network art projects. How do we preserve this for the future? Can we only talk about it? We have a few pictures, that's it. Or can we actually try to reenact it? Can we make it, can we preserve it in other ways, by doing some sort of spin-offs, maybe, or trying to, every now and then, see how we could do it now? My question, as I also put it in the program here, is what to do with this in a post-Snowden time? And this is also something that we discussed with Gervry Stokkar, the, an old-time collaborator of Robert Adrian and now the director of us at Ektronica. So, this picture that you see here, I don't know if you saw the talk by Dennis DeBell yesterday. He talked about glass noodles, these Chinese rice noodles, to use as data transmission cables. And this is another project by him, where he has a Wi-Fi with a network attached to a cat. Something like this, would that be usable for a project like this? Or, well, anyway, I have, I want to close this off now. What would be a contemporary equivalent to the Ipsenet? That is my question to you, basically. What do you think? Because they used, these were artists using a corporate network, and we are now, we might say the internet is no longer free, so can we just use this, see it as a contemporary Ipsenet? Or do we need to do this project completely in other networks that we develop ourselves, so in alternative networks? This would be a question for you, I guess. So I have more questions for you, maybe, than you for me. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for this blast in the past presentation. The floor is open for questions. If you have questions or remarks for Josefine, please come to one of the microphones in the front or the back and state your question, please. Or suggestion. Or suggestion. Maybe suggestion is the pixel flood. I'm sorry? Did you see the pixel flood in the bar? The pixel flood screen in the bar. Did you see that one or not? Pixel what? The pixel flood. The pixel flood is a protocol where every time you send one pixel to the screen. No, I haven't seen it. Okay, it's very interesting. There are four or five people all trying to put some image on the screen and they all try, use different techniques to put their image and not get it wiped out by others. And I think you could set up several places where you have pixel screens in different places and send each other messages or images or things like this. Do you know who does it? Because that would be interesting to have these people participate. You should come afterwards to me and then... I will have a look at it. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. Anyone else? No? Okay, one more. We have one more. I have a question about what you just showed us the social... Can you move slightly closer to the mic, please? I have a question about what you just showed us the social habits, I think. So the artist as a facilitator and the other bullet points. Could you maybe elaborate about... What do you think of this today? Has it come true? Did his prediction that the artist is becoming a facilitator... Has it become true or not? Yes, it has. But the thing is that with these kinds of predictions and these kinds of statements... You always have to keep in mind that it's not something that sort of wipes out everything else that happens. So it's one particular practice that happens next to others. There's still very traditional ways of working in the art world. Well, the art world at large, the commercial art world... The world works along making a painting or a sculpture and selling it for high prices still. But I think we have to move to a different kind of system. And I am... Well, this is not part of my talk here, but a personal view of mine is that... We each should support artists much more individually. So rather than just participating, I think it should become much more normal... Also like you do with software, that you pay a few dollars if you use somebody's program. Why not donate something for a crowdfunding project for an artwork? That is maybe not useful to you, but for many other people it will be. Not useful in the sense of a piece of software that can do something. I fully agree. Okay, thank you. We have one more? I fully agree as well, by the way. Related to the pixel-fluid project that's all around now, there was also a slower version. I think it was on Reddit where almost the whole world worked together to draw one big picture. Thank you. So how do you guys feel about the potential of networks that are not connected to the Internet? For a project like this? Could you build a global network performance? Or at least large in terms of space that does not involve the Internet? Would that be possible? Maybe this is not for this crowd, maybe it's just somebody watching on the screen... On the stream, I mean. So this is really a question for me. Shall we leave it here? Do you want to add something? Do we have some suggestions? Yes, my suggestion here would be maybe use ham radio that already existed back then in the 70s and 80s. Because they still use a slow-scan TV in their technology. That's true. When you come to Oldston Field, you see some of these guys put their own antenna. They are ham radio experts, I guess. Maybe talk to them. That's a very good suggestion. Thank you. This could be done worldwide, live and completely run privately. No corporations at all involved. Yesterday this artist that I'm talking about from the CAT project that I just showed... He said he just got his ham license and that actually in Holland every province has its own school education system around this ham radio. And that it's really, really educational. So they teach you wonderful things. It's not just about talking to each other. It's really about hands-on technology and building from scratch. One more comment if you're asking for the out-of-there technologies. It's not something that I like or even approve of, but your question inspired me to think about the amateur satellites. So there is a lot of groups, especially at these hackers' events, that actually talk about launching their own satellite. So you had the world in 24 hours, now maybe we are going beyond the world. So you could have the artworks being added to those satellite launches to send our art further than Earth. And Yogi from Moor Ate is one of them and there is a Greek group which is making their own satellites. And that could be maybe an idea. But then it stays in space, I suppose. It doesn't come back, yeah? Out of these worlds. Okay, can I have a warm applause for Josefine Bosma? Thank you.