by Daniel P. McVeigh
In 1667 Robert Hooke described how the first string phone, a tightly drawn wire fixed at both ends to open-ended cylinders, could propagate sound to a very considerable distance. His application for this device was to be used in the context of theater. In 1821 Sir Charles Wheatstone of England invented an instrument for transmitting sounds which was described in the "Repository of Arts" as the telephone. He wrote an article describing the telephone in the context of theater. Because of his description the instrument would later be known as the "theatrophone." Fifty years later, Wheatstone went on to become the world's leading authority on the telegraph. In 1857 a German pianist Hermann Helmholtz used an electromagnet to cause the wires in his piano to vibrate. Helmholtz dedicated his life's work to experimenting with "Electric Audio". Helmholtz's experiments would directly influence the design of Bell's first telephone.
Philip Reis will of course always be remembered as a scientist who did invent the telephone ("Das TelePhon") with the intention of sending speech. Reis, as well as many of his colleagues in many demonstrations, did transmit speech with "Das TelePhon." The successful use of his instrument for the transmission of speech has all been very well documented in newspapers, scientific journals, and also in front of hundreds of spectators particularly from 1860 to 1865.
I am interested in Reis's work not only for his brilliant process of inventing the telephone, the first model of which was a three foot model of a human ear carved out of a wooden beer barrel with a taut sausage skin for an ear drum, but for his public demonstrations which were created in the context of art and not in the context of business communications.
Philip Reis produced the first telepoetry events as well as the first network music performances. The first network music performance was done at a distance of one hundred and fifty feet. So was this a demonstration of technology or did Reis add an artistic touch?
Thirty years later Bell's lawyers would argue in court that Reis's device did not work, meaning it could not transmit an articulate sound. Reis never constructed more then fifty working telephones. Some people were able to get the device to work without a problem, while others could not get the device to function at all. Reis's brilliance lies not only in his abilities as an inventor, but also in his function as an artist creating an instrument which only the artist could really make sing.
Public demonstrations such as Reis's were duplicated fifteen years later by Bell. There was also a flurry of such activity in Australia as the telephone started to integrate into the culture. But this flurry of activity died down after about two years. As an art form it never really received any attention, nor did it become a part of the music or theater world at that time. However this twenty year period showed the world a new networked technology and invited the artist to play a part in its in acculturation process.
Visual Art
Massacio presented figures with a different set of relations to space. Cezanne broke the view of the Renaissance with its one point perspective and proposed several different points of view within one image through multiple angles of view. Marcel Duchamp proposed this same idea in 1913 with the piece "Trois Stoppages-e'talon". Here Duchamp shows a one meter thread dropping from a height of one meter and tracing the line formed to create a new standard meter. By creating three of them he suggested that there were several points of view, several ways of measuring something, and that each of us carries within his own standard meter.
Duchamp's philosophy defined work as having two poles, the artist and the spectator, each equally important. McLuhan, in his philosophy, proposes that the individual will become both the producer and the consumer simultaneously. Later, in the work of the Electronic Cafe, we see the artist as artist, spectator, consumer and producer. Duchamp's definition is one of a broadcast network, McLuhan's definition is no doubt describing the Internet and the World Wide Web of today.
Video
Nam June Paik, considered the founder of "video art" helped us to see the plasticity of the electronic image and to understand that it was a processed image, not a transmission of reality. Wolf Vostell desanctified the television set by deconstructing it. Moholy-Nagy was working with the telephone as a tool for image creation as early as 1922. In Boston, Allen Kaprow, the father of "The Happenings", played with communications systems in the 60's, exploring the potential of interactivity with the tool of the television.Hello Hello involved a five site link up. This piece was designed for a community gathering or better known at the time as a "Be In". This work presented an idea so strong and so ahead of its time that it is not until now that we are really seeing its impact. The Electronic Cafe International TM would work with the same idea to again link five sites together in 1984 (almost 20 years later). From there they would go on to start to build a hybrid network called "Electronic Cafe International". Artist on-line also starts in Europe around the same time. Artist on-line also follows some of the concepts of Allen Kaprow.
In 1977 the NASA satellite arts project invited several artists to participate. Among the invited were Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabonwitz,who produced a piece with two dancers, each at a remote site, who performed together linked by satellite. Dancers in two cities. Hole in Space 1980 connected two cities, New York and Los Angles, allowing the people to become both artist and spectator simultaneously. Artists created kinetic sculpture at scale.
ELECTRONIC CAFE INTERNATIONAL
Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabonwitz of the Electronic Cafe International conceptualized and worked to build a living breathing sculpture. The Electronic Cafe International's primary objective is to support the creative collaborative process. Its first design criteria is to respond to the dynamic multi-dimensionality of human senses and processes. The ECI system is designed as a multi-media, multi-vendor, multi-cultural telecommunications and teleconferencing system.
To try to document the amount of work I did with Electronic Cafe International would easily be a years work in itself. For the purpose of this thesis I will try and give a very brief overview. ECI produced on-line telecommunications events in countries around the world. They used black and white video phones and ISDN video teleconferencing. From 1992 to 1995 I worked with people on a global scale to help build the network. I put in over 12,000 hours working 12 to 14 hour days. When working large scale events I would not sleep for two days due to the tremendous amount of work. In that time I worked from New York to produce tele-poetry events, a New Years Eve round the world telebration, collaborative dance pieces, collaborative painting sessions, network music festivals, a special event to bring together the old Warhol factory, and many other events. I also worked to fund all of the events being done on the network. The most active sites were ECI in Santa Monica, the McLuhan Center in Toronto, Don Foresta and Eleanor Ruff in Paris, Michael Franch and Nielsen Morten Teisner in Denmark, Masami Kukuchi in Tokyo, Graham Smith in Toronto, Marcello Dantas in Rio, and Aileen MacKeogh and Barry O'Neill at Art House in Dublin.
The artists I worked with during that time were Nam June Paik, Taylor Mead, Bob Holman, Emily XYZ, Miguel Alguerin, Lois Griffith, Steve Cannon, Ben Neil, Richard Bugg, Toni Childs, Mark Coniglio, Dawn Stoppiello and Ilan Egeland. The venues in New York were Viacom, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The Kitchen, and finally The Knitting Factory.
Don Foresta - Artists On-line
Artists On-Line, created in 1990, is an international network of interactive exchange using ISDN connections between art schools, research centers and independent artists. The network has brought together nineteen permanent correspondents in eighteen cities in eight countries: France, Germany, The United Kingdom, Spain, Denmark, the United States, Canada and Japan. The number of cities and countries connected to the network is continually increasing, reflecting one of the current objectives of its founder, Don Foresta, to reach the critical mass necessary to provoke an upward shift in the evolution of interactive creativity.
Artists On-Line uses ISDN and the Internet to promote, through artistic and cultural activities, the exploration, development and use of interactive communication as a way of testing its cultural potential. The art network has always used the newest developments in technology such as video-conferencing, screen-sharing, and the exchange of high quality image, sound and text files in its efforts to become multimedia before it even came to be called multimedia.
The extremely rapid progress being made in these technologies calls for considerable thought to be devoted to the cultural integration of these new means of communication. Unfotunately culture is not something which industry and commerce recognize as a priority. Network artists, however, incorporate these systems into a philosophical framework of artistic creation and communication, making interactive collaboration one of their major contemporary concerns. Plastic artists, traditionally occupied by the still image, now must take into account the organization of time and the meaning of interactivity which were formerly the exclusive domains of performing artists. The actual tool used - computer, video or telecommunications - is not an end in itself for the artist-researcher. What is demonstrated by the artist participating in the technical evolution is the importance of the "end-product" and the awareness of its artistic, social, cultural and ethical connotations.
Artists On-Line is the back room laboratory to the international public communications network. It is the place where artists and art students can explore new ideas in interactivity, test new equipment, experiment with new procedures, and develop new visual languages. This growing network is a virtual space where students from several different cultures can work together with interactive projects, testing the potential of the Information Highway as it is constructed.
Once the experimentation proves satisfactory to the creator, the results are taken to the front room and exposed to the public in whatever venue is considered suitable. By being put before the public, the idea - the project - is tested, modified, sometimes abandoned, but always part of the on-going evolution of the user's manual of interactivity. The artist is wearing the white lab coat.
The Music conservatory, NICE, France Luc Martinez , Michel Redolfi, Dan Harris
In the late eighties and early nineties Artist/Musician Michel Redolfi worked with Luc Martinez and Dan Harris to construct underwater interactive MIDI music performances. Sound engineer Dan Harris constructed sub aquatic acoustic environments. I spoke with Michel Redolfi and asked him this question: "If you play the music underwater, how do people hear it?" Michel replied: "You float in the pool of course." This installation in Nice, France, was very impressive on several levels.
When I began the installation at Mote Marine Labs I received help from Dan Harris. It was Dan who helped me design the hydra phones which I used in the underwater installation to transmit audio over the ISDN lines.
I have been most influenced by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz co founders of Electronic Cafe International, Don Foresta who runs Artist's On-line in Europe and Gene Young Blood. Gene Young Blood is known as a writer, however he conducted an interview with Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz that completely changed the way I view media, specifically the press. I now believe it is a fact that the freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns it. I must add that the same week I saw Gene's interview I also saw the movie "The Panama Deception", a documentary which protested the US military action in Panama. The film was banned for two years in the US. However once it received the Academy Award for best documentary, in 1994, the U.S. government could not stop its mass distribution. Many artists had done on-line events using the Internet, however no one had come close to the dynamic two way interactive networked video done by Kit and Sherrie!
As far as my practical work I would have to say that I have been heavily influenced by Luc Martinez , Michel Redolfi and Dan Harris. I was so impressed by what Michel Redolfi did by breaking the physical barriers in producing the underwater interactive music piece. That for me made my work possible because once I had seen it locally, I knew that it could be done with telecommunications.
I spoke all about the project with them. They were wonderful and very supportive. I could not have gotten as far as I did had it not been for Dan Harris's help with the hydra phone.
Daniel P. McVeigh