 So hi everyone. So today I'm going to talk about the Minitel, the Pamal group work, and media archeological art. First, thank you so much for inviting us and Jonathan Hogg for organizing everything with us in such a caring fashion. So let's go. Okay, so Pamal. Pamal is an acronym. It means preservation and art, media archeology lab. Pamal was found in 2013 by Lionel Broix and Emmanuel Ghez. First it was a research unit in an art school in France, in Avignon. And then in 1999, it became an independent artist collective and was renamed Pamal Group. We're now six members. Lionel Broix, who is an artist, Emmanuel Ghez, who's an artist, Stéphane Bizet, who's an engineer, Morgan Strickott, who's a conservator, restaurateur of digital arts at the ZKM, Armand Dinschal, who's an artist, and recently myself, who's an artist too. So you can see here some shelves from the former lab of the Pamal Group when it was based in Avignon. Now we're based mostly in Orléans in France and also scattered around France and Europe since Morgan is in Germany. So you see on our labs, there is a lot of computer equipment and mostly old machines. Many mini-tales and even our masterpiece, the Petcomo door, which we love, which is very impressive when you open the hood. And you can also see the orange phone there. Actually, it's called a Tectac. It was born in 1974. And the idea of this machine is to acoustically couple voice frequency from telephone with a box full of electronics, a phone line, and a television screen to display the result of the transmission of information, sound information onto a computer screen. So it's like the ancestor of all the mini-tale thing I will explain to you later. Okay, so what is Pamal? Pamal Group creates its own work from digital artworks that have disappeared, or been badly damaged mainly due to the obsolescence of computer software and electronic hardware. We work and we seek to make sensitive the vulnerability and the fragility of an art, the digital art, that is so strongly dependent on industrial logics. All the works that the Pamal Group reconstructs as close as possible to the original materiality and temporality, sometimes in an incomplete way, are considered archives. We focus on the effect of machine obsolescence on art and culture with this particular emphasis on digital artwork preservation and creation from these artwork archives. So what is mini-tale? Mini-tale, the acronym stands for medium interactive by numérisation d'information téléphonique. You need it a little French in the conference. So in English it means interactive medium by digitalizing telephone information. It was a French invention of a passive computer terminal consisting of a keyboard and a nine-inch, no, screens, that was devoid of any processing capacity or storage. You see it over there. So the mini-tale was connected to a French service, a video textile and it was in use from 1980 to 2012. Actually it was full of services that could be accessed from a phone line thanks to a built-in modem that had a download speed of 1,200 bytes per second and an upload speed of 75 bits per second. The mini-tale was itself equipped with T-plugs so that it could plug into the French telecom telephone network. On the screen you can see some example of services over there after that you see artworks on the mini-tale but those are like actual services that you could access when it was up and working. So for the color mini-tale, actually the screen is a text matrix of 25 lines and 40 columns in the video text mode and most mini-tale are black and white so they have eight shades of gray for this black and white version. It works with a set of graphic characters that are each composed of six bytes and make it possible to display image in such a tile style. So users, we when we were younger, had to call a short four-digit number the 3615 plus blah blah blah and we accessed the service when we heard the dial tone that was so cute and then press connection to access the page. So this concept was also commercialized in other countries like Brazil with the video text tool, Alex in Quebec and built some text in Germany. It should be noted that mini-tale is not kind of an internet ancestor like we hear so many times actually both were at the same time in parallel between the 80s and the 90s. So mini-tale has been down in since 10 years now because it was down in 2012. Okay, so today we'll present you the Pama Group research and reconstruction of artworks made with the mini-tale. You can see one there in the middle of the pieces during one of the workshops. Then I will present you the Global Thematics Network that the Pama Group has recreated, enabling people to contemplate two days those artworks that were created back then and in between inaccessible since it died. I'm a specify that there are many famous artists that have worked with mini-tale at the time. So it became an art medium like each time a new medium comes up, some artist takes it and make art with it. So it happened with the mini-tale too, like for example Daniel Buren, Orlan, Eduard Docac, Angélette Chia, John Cage, also Vera Mollner and Christian Prigeant. Here you can see a work by Daniel Buren on the mini-tale and there even was a magazine called Art Access funded in 1986 by Orlan and Frédéric De Velet that were promoting artworks made for the mini-tale. Here is a Madonna by Orlan. You can see the dot matrix. OK, now I will present you two artworks by the Pama Group that are dedicated to telematic art. One is PTT, Profound Telematic Time and the other one is 3615 Love, which you will be able to experience tonight on the container on the other side of the camp. So Profound Telematic Time that you can see here is an installation created for the exhibition Résumons. That was commissioned by Marie-Ange Brailleur and Olivier Zétonne and that took place very recently from February 23 to April 25 at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris. It was, we had like a series in the Centre Georges-Pompidou, a series of great exhibition about digital art and culture and this is, Résumons was the last exhibition of this series. So here is Profound Telematic Time at the Centre Georges-Pompidou. A technical medium never dies, but it is reconfigured by the new. The installation Profound Telematic Time is a media archaeology work made from disappeared telematic artworks. As I said before, the mini-tale network was closed in France in 1912. So, most of the telematic works created during the 80s for, for example, cult exhibitions of digital arts and culture, like électra les immatériaux, have disappeared. The Pama Group has reconstructed some of this work in a media archaeological way, which means with the original software and hardware. In the installation PTT, these works appear with the gaps linked to their incomplete reconstruction. As archives of seemingly pastimes, they become the artistic medium of another work of art that gives them a second life while preserving their temporal depth. PTT is made of three metal shelves with three levels on each and on each shelf are placed three archive objects, a mini-tale, one or two old computers and or a cardboard archive containing the documentation of a work or of the networks. Thus, the installation comprises of 27 objects. As you can see on the pictures, only the mini-tales are switched on. They are connected to the Pama Group Wipital Telematic Server that I will explain later if I don't talk too much right now, so I need to be fast. When entering the rooms, the visitors see only the back of the first shelf. It was really beautiful when you discovered it was kind of obscure and then you got in and you saw all the back of the mini-tales and the Arduino and all the cables and the LEDs. It was like an organism. It was pretty mysterious. And when we went around, you saw like all the face and the depth with the depth of the three shelves and the mini-tale gives a special rhythm because the image appeared on the screen really slowly like that line by line. And so they were like kind of responding to one another. And so to access the archive installed on the mini-tale or the two other shelves, the visitor must look through the shelf or through two of them. So it's kind of like, this is the idea of the depth that I was talking about earlier. So it's kind of looking through the depths of Telematic history. The deepest shelf, the third one, which is only visible from the back or through the transparency, contains an archive of the electro-exhibition, as called by Jacques-Élie Chabert and Camille Philibert. I'll get back to later. The second shelf, the intermediate one, presents an archive of video text poems by Édouard O'Cac from 1984. I will also get back to that in detail later. And the third, the most visible, presents an archive of the exhibition Les Y Matériaux at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1985, which is called l'objet perdu by Jacques-Élie Chabert and Camille Philibert. This is our cartel that we put up in every exhibition, and that is also over there in the container and saying, dear visitor, due to the natural cycle of machines, some elements of the artwork could be out of order. So this possibility is part of the work. It's not like a fail for us. So 3615 Love. 3615 Love is an installation based on archives of old and recent telematic artworks. For that purpose, the Pama Group has reconstructed the works of Jacques-Élie Chabert and Camille Philibert, l'objet perdu from 1985, and also the work Video Text Poems from 1985, 86 by Édouard O'Cac. The work also hosts a more recent piece that was made by the artist Marie Moulin, QR code in 2018. The sustainability of the works produced for the mini-tel depends on many things. First, the preservation of devices that were made by a disappeared industry, such as la radio technique or Alcatel, which are respectfully closed since 2002 and 2016, but also of the network which was abandoned in 2012. The integrity of the mini-tel terminal is fully preserved, but they become rare and more and more rare to get a hold of. 3615 Love have been exposed in many different places over the years, and each time its shape is slightly different. Here it was in 1919 at Arrérés aux socios at Cerrisis-la-Salle. Here it was in Slovenia, in Ljubljana, in May of 2020, and here you can see the last one on the big picture with the yellow wall that was indexing Poland in October 2021, and then other pics of Fondation Vasarelli for the Gamers Festival in Exem Provence or in Amsterdam in 1919. And finally, 3615 Love here at EMF, and you see where we are on the map so that you can visit us later at 7 o'clock tonight. Okay, so reconstructing a mini-tel-based artwork. What does it consist of? So to explain to you what we do and reconstruct such a work, we'll take the example of the work that Pamard Group did on Videotech. So in 2014, at the end of the year, there was a second nature art center in Exem Provence during the Pamard Group exhibition called Une Archaeologie des médias, was presented the first reconstruction of Édouard D'Ocaque Videotech's poem, which was a telematic artwork from 1985. Telematic means with minitel hardware, videotech software, and teletel network. So this artwork was shown on the Brazilian minitel network, which was called Videotexto. Here you can see the public terminals that they had in Brazil. Of course they have all disappeared, but here what it looked like. So the idea, the Pamard Group goal was restoring the original experience of Édouard D'Ocaque's videotech's poem. This meant reconstructing an archive of the original work. The Pamard Group archive that they reconstruct is called a second original, which is different from the artwork. So what do we need for reconstruction? At first, we need a color minitel for this special work because it's colored. Okay. So in this case, it's the only hardware that is able to display the work. Nevertheless, such an object is very rare. A color minitel is really harder to find, and black and white ones were like for general public. The color minitails were only for professionals. So we need to get a hand on one of those terminals. Then we need a videotech programming console. That's what you see on the screen. So what we're used to program the graphics. We have almost all disappeared. The Pamard Group, but one recently, but we haven't tasted it yet so far. So you'll see we use another process to reconstruct the artworks. And third, we need a network. Okay. Reconstruction of Édouard D'Ocaque. Oh, my God. No color minitel. No console. No network. Damn. We were in trouble. But it was not the first problem. It was the only problem. Just the first one. Because we had a second problem about the artwork itself. Actually, the only remaining traces of the videotech poems were a slide that were made during the Brazil High Tech Exhibition in 1986. And a QuickTime animation created from those slides for archival purposes. The QuickTime animation was proved to be a good basis for work despite some inconsistencies. For example, the animation used colors. That was not the colors in the minitel scale. They used characters impossible to display, et cetera. But actually, well, it looked hopeless, but they went on whatsoever. And the reconstruction consisted of two stages. First, reconstruction of the artwork's code and the reconstruction of the network, as I said earlier. Okay. So, reconstructing the artwork's code. As you can see there on this slide, I really love this picture because there is everything on it. Actually, the slide that I was talking about earlier, they existed, but the group only had access to photos of the slide. You can see them printed on the sheet of paper. Well, yeah, this is where you look at, not there. So, this paper there, you can see the printout of the slides. So, actually, the reconstruction consisted of reconstructing all the images by hand and then placing themselves at the lowest level of digital programming hardware, which was like at the bit level. This is the media archeology point of view. So, therefore, they edited the video text frames with a hexadecimal editor. Well, I might show you in the end if I still have time. So, that meant translating the animation into hexadecimal code in order to transmit them to the minitel. And the deed that was grids and encoding tables, and that's how they reconstructed all the image. The reconstruction was supposed to be like the original frame character, byte character, byte by byte, according to manual transcription of the images on the frame. So, you can see it there. These are the charts for the coding of the characters. So, once the frames have been edited, well, the minitel displays the animation of the video text poems. You can see on the screen. So, Ria Bracadabra, I'm not too good with the Portuguese. Teçao and Ricaeus and Deus. So, in order to be as close as possible to the Brazilian experience, the Pama Group rejected the idea of looping and scrolling of the four animation. So, they created an additional welcome screen that you can see there on the slide, enabling the spectator to choose which poem they wanted to see with a minitel keyboard. So, the spectator finds the original sensations of a spectator of the minitel from back then, interacting with the terminal itself. So, here we are at Le Palais de Tokyo for the exhibition Vision in 1915, where the Pama showed the reconstructed archive of the video text poems. Okay, so, I'll make a little interlude and take you to Warsaw. Emmanuel Guest was there a few years ago for a conference. He went for a walk to think about his talk and he came across this. It was a very good restaurant. He says very good Lithuanian cold soup, so we will believe it on parole. So, Warsaw was completely destroyed, as you know, during Second World War, and after the war, it was rebuilt, especially from Canaletto paintings. Look at this house sign. It indicates two dates. The date of the construction of the original building that was destroyed and the date of reconstruction. We are searching to do the same and asking the same thing for digital artwork and their preservation and reconstruction. Now, look at this. These are the video text poems showed at the White Chapel Gallery in London in 1916, presented on a great website for Internet art, RISOM, and finally purchased by Zitate London in 2018 and the MoMA in New York in 1919. The label indicates the artwork dates back to 1985, but this is wrong. In parallel with Pamale Research and reconstruction of his work, Edward O'Cack proposed a reinterpretation of the video text poem. In practice, the Minitel Expo that you see here is an empty shell into which a tablet PC has been inserted, showing the video produced by the Pamale. The hell is from a black and white Minitel to Model, which is not even a color one. The brightness and brilliance of the screen, the color and the absence of flicker typical to cathode ray tubes betray that it's a tablet and does not correspond in any way to what the viewer can see with the Pamale Second Original Reconstruction. So, from an aesthetic, historical and technical point of view, media technical point of view, this is a reinterpretation of the 1985 artwork according to variable media theory and not a restoration. In fact, MoMA has purchased an artwork from 1916, from 2016. Okay. So, back to Pamale Group work. So, this is another work by the Pamale Group. It's L'Objet Perdue, which is a Minitel artwork by Camille Filibert and Jacqueline Chabert. L'Objet Perdue was presented at the exhibition Les Imatériaux at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1985. And it's a multi-pult choice telematic novel. It consisted of 250 screens, but everything was lost but a serigraphy prints. So, I'll go a little faster than I thought. The idea was to show you another way of reconstruction, like this time, not from videos, a slide, but from serigraphy prints. And here is the reconstructed Second Original. I showed at Sory Zilassa by the Pamale Group. So, I just like those two. Okay. I'll go fast with that. So, for the physical interaction that I was talking earlier, the Pamale Group developed a software called Arbol Maker. It helps to design the tree structure of a Minitel service, and it allows us to create a home page, descending and ascending like engine, then it generates a final JSON file. So, the network. This is our stuff. So, we have the great joy today, the great pleasure, in order to present the WIPiTel. It's up there in the container. As we said before, the Minitel network is down. So, the Pamale have reconstructed a network for the Minitel. Here, okay. So, this is a quick schematic of how it worked before. And this is what we put up for today. So, this is our WIPiTel server. Here, you have the schematics for the online version. But here, on the container over there, it's a local version. So, you just erase it. We sign on the middle. But actually, it's kind of the same. So, we have a server running. And why do we run a server? We could just put the files on the Arduino and plug it right to the Minitel. But no, actually, the thing is, as I told you at the beginning, the transmission of data for Minitel was made by sound. So, our network preserved this. And so, as Yonell sent me in a text message two days ago, when I said, tell me again about the server. You say, just tell them that with our servers, the Minitel sings. I just love that. So, I repeat the message from Yonell. Hi, Yonell. So, that's the idea. Actually, with the WIPiTel, we could connect like 50 Minitels to the server, and although the WIPiTel boxes demodulates the signal and send them to the Minitel. So, the reconstruction is complete. We have, as we said first, the terminal. So, the hardware. We have all the software environment. And we have the network. So, there was like the translation of data into sound. It's kind of a couple of technical information, but it's in French. Whatever. Okay. And here is the socket, the magical socket where we plug our Minitel into the WIPiTel, into the Minitel, and that's where the data modulation gets in and makes the Minitel thing. So, here it is. The WIPiTel server with the little screen showing what's happening on the Raspberry Pi there. So, for all this reconstruction works, the Minitel developed a series of software, like MiEdit, which is a software developed by Frédéric Brisson, aka Izigazu, and Pamel participated in making another version. And actually, it's the exact decimal editor that I was talking earlier at the beginning. That's what helps us make the graphics since we don't have the programming console yet. And also, there are some software that you can see over there that are developed into the processing environments, like transforming some JPEGs into VDTs that we can work on for video text images. So, you can check that out on the Pamel website. And if you have any question or anything, just contact us like on this email over there. And my computer says Friday 428, but we're one hour different from France, so it's Friday 328, so I think I'm quite on time.