definingthe imageas place

a conversationwith

kit gallowaysherrie rabinowitz& gene youngblood

Kit Gallowili+a1nd Sherrie Rabinowitz

52/HIGH PERFORMANCE/Issue 37/1987

Smce meeting in 1975, Kit Gallowayand Sherrie Rabinowitz have fo-cused their collaborative art career

on developing new and alternative struc-tures for video as an interactive com-munication form . Under their organiza-tional moniker of Mobile Image, the pairhave created three major works, SatelliteArts Project (1977), Hole-in-Space (1980)and Electronic Cafe (1984) [see photo cap-tions fordescriptions], as well as numeroussmaller projects . Their sophisticated know-ledge of satellite telecommunications hasmade them sought-after consultants in thefield and their research has resulted innumerous contributions to the technology .They combine the technological andsociological possibilities of two-way com-munications with artistic sensibility tocreate elegant models of the way thingscould be . These "models," a term theyprefer to "artworks," serve not only as a vi-sion of how telecommunications couldserve humanity but also put forward someprovocative notions ofthe future and func-tion of the artist.GeneYoungblood has been awriter, lec-

turer and teacher on the subject of art andnew technology for 17 years. In 1970 heauthored Expanded Cinema, the first bookabout video as an artistic medium . Todayhe is considered one of the most informedand articulate theorists of media art andpolitics . His theory ofthe "creative conver-sation" is an inspiring vision of the role ofthe artist in society.'Youngblood is a faculty member at Cali-

fornia Institute of the Arts, where heteaches the history and theory of experi-mental film and video. He is currently col-laborating with Rabinowitz and Gallowayon a new book titled Virtual Space: TheChallenge To Create At The Same Scale AsWe Can Destroy. According to Young-blood, Virtual Space will examine the poli-tical, philosophic and aesthetic implica-tions of the communications revolution.

In addition to their contributions to Vir-tual Space, Rabinowitz and Galloway aredeveloping a composite-image perfor-mance between dancers in the SovietUnion and the United States. A secondproject-in-progress, Light Transition, willuse satellite television images to sync con-temporary technologywith natural systemsand ancient technology such as Stone-henge. Critical moments of sun/moon't1-tersection, etc., will appear for 20 secondsevery half-hour on a cable TVsuperstation."This project will be more poetic than ourothers," said Galloway . "It's basically acelebration of earth's systems and human-made technological systems. We hope tocreate a project in which both systemsreflect the elegance of the other."

by steven durland

In early March I visited the Mobile Im-age studio in Santa Monica and listened inas Rabinowitz, Galloway and Youngblooddiscussed the work of Mobile Image andits implications for the future of art andcommunication .

SHERRIE RABINOWITZ: When Kit and Ifirst met itwas in Paris. I'd been invited overand I was introduced to him as the personwho knows everything about ze video inFrance, in Paris.

KIT GALLOWAY : Bit of an exaggeration .SR: Before we met I was working in SanFrancisco and helped start Optic Nerve, agroupthere, and Kitwasworking in Europewith the Video Heads. Both of us throughour experiences had come to two realiza-tions. One is thatthe power of television isits ability to be live, to support real-timeconversation independent of geography.Number two wasasense of the way televi-sion is experienced, the way it's taken in,this wash of images with nobody reallyremembering the context of any particularimage. Television is an image environmentand that's how you have to understand it .Making tapes didn't make sense becauseit wasn't affecting the context or theenvironment.

Kit had become interested in satellites,in'73, 74 . When we metwe put our ideastogether and developed the track thatwe've been on ever since.KG: Living in Europe I could seewhat effecttelevision was having on different coun-tries, reading all the material at UNESCObackwhen satelliteswere beginning to ap-pear and were seen as a weapon against il-literacy. I was seeing howmost of the worldapart from the United States had an inter-national policy for telecommunications .But the United States, under the guise of"free flow of information," was putting for-ward a policy of first-come, first-served,screwyou ifyou can't get up there and parka satellite.

I was aware of the imbalance and I gotmore andmore interested in television andits technology as a communicationsmedium . We started looking at ways of us-ing international satellite transmissions .There were no interesting ideas in themountains of UNESCO documentation.We looked at the idea of collaborative per-formances between artists in differentcountries meeting in this composite-imagespace we had conceived, mixing the liveimages from remote locations and present-ing that mix at each location so that perfor-mers could see themselves on the samescreen with theirpartners . That became thepremise of the work and experimentationwe wanted to do.

In '75 NASA announced that they wereaccepting proposals from public organiza-

"Kit and Sherrie createcontext rather thancontent. An artist canenter the context theycreate and makecontent, which will nowbe empowered andrevitalized in a way thatit could never havebeen empoweredwithout the context thatthese people set up."

-Gene Youngblood

1987/Issue 37/HIGH PERFORMANCE/5 3

Satellite Arts Project. A Space With NoGeographical Boundaries, 1977. In collabora-

tion with NASA, the world's first interactivecomposite-image satellite dance perfor-

mance. Using the U.S.Canadian CTS satellite,dancers located 3000 miles apart at NASA

Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland andthe Educational TV Center, Menlo Park, Calffomia were electronically composited into asingle image that was displayed on monitors

at each location, creating a "space with nogeographical boundaries" or virtual space inwhich the live performance took place. Per-

formance includes the first satellite time-delayfeedback dance; three location live-feed com-posite performance; flutist Paul Horn playing

with his time echo. July performance andthree-day performance in November. Pic-

tured: The center dancer, Mitsuko Mitsueda,is in Maryland, keyed into the west coast loca-tion to dance with her partners Keija Kimura

and Soto Hoffman in California .

54/HIGH PERFORMANCE/Issue 17/1987

0

tions to experiment with their US/Canadi-an satellite. They were trying to drum upsome public support by providing access .So we hopped on a Russian liner and lan-ded in NewYork and in a couple of monthshad secured NASA underwriting for a pro-ject thatwas going to lastfor about a year, aproject that to date is probablythe most in-tensive look at the interactive potential ofhuman communications, and satellite timedelay problems .SR : It's still the most sophisticated. And iYsonly been in the past fewyears that peoplehave come to appreciate what it is . It's stillnot been duplicated .

HIGH PERFORMANCE: How did your_projects develop?KG : We came back here with the idea thatwe would work domestically, doing modelprojects, and then, when we had thecredentials, to move out internationally .

SR : We did a number of projects-large-scale ones like Satellite Arts, Hole-in-Spaceand Electronic Cafe and smaller ones thathad a different intensity, laboratory things .KG : The first project was called The SatelliteArts Project.SR : When we first did Satellite Arts nobodywas interested in satellites, everybody wasinterested in, I don't know, video art . Ittook a long time . And now others havecaught up. We always approached the im-age as a place. To our way of thinking, theessence, the magic, is this ability to carry aliving event and then interconnect withsatellites to connect places over vast dis-tances . When we started, and even now,there was no aesthetic approach to this.Businesses used teleconferencing, but theaesthetics of what that connection is, is awhole new reality that hasn't been ex-plored . In a sense it's a meta-design. It's

looking at the live image in telecommuni-cations as part of a grander structure.KG : You just don't go out, which is relative-ly easyto do, and rent satellite time and dosomething that would be of any significantcontribution outside of the context of ig-norance. There's a great context of ignor-ance both in the industry and in the anworld as to the intrinsic nature of thismedium . We focus on the living event, notbeing too concerned with whether it's art-like or not. We don't produce artifacts, weproduce living events that take place overaperiod of time, to facilitate a quality of hu-man to human interaction .GENE YOUNGBLOOD : When video firststarted there were three directions that ittook, all simultaneously. One was "artist'svideo," that is, people like Bruce Naumanand Vito Acconci, who came from the artworld, using video to document their artpractices. Then there was what is called, forlack of a better term, "electronic video,"that is, the exploration ofthe essence ofthemedium, represented by people like theVasulkas . Then there was "political video,"guerrilla television and so on, which wasessentially a documentary tradition . Butthat excluded thiswhole otherworld of liveinterconnection, which is what Kit andSherrie represent. It's an important direc-tion.KG : Other artists have accessed satellitetechnology but look atwhat Douglas Davishas done with his access, or NamJune Paikmore recently. Doug's pieces have beenvery sort of "artist using a satellite with awritten scenario," like a theater piece thatis all scripted out and some interaction isthen portrayed during the access of thistechnology. It's still held within the contextof control.GY : Spectacle.SR : One of the essences of our work isscale. When you galvanize that much tech-nology and that many resources it's not likean artist working in a garrett. As soon as youwork with telecommunications, a satel-lite's part ofyour structure, as is the societyaround you. You have to deal with NASAand Western Union to access your satellitetime . You have to deal with where thesatellite comes in, you have to deal withthe real thing, and it's expensive. So theidea of doingsomethingthat's self-focusedjust doesn't seem to be a very ecological,political use ofthe medium . You can't dealwith this technologywithout dealingwith itpolitically .

GY : It really pushes upagainst a question ofhow far an artist is willing to go in the direc-tion of not being an artist, giving up the egoidentification with the product. That's acentral issue with all this . Everybody knowsthat people in power can use this technol-ogy to put on a spectacle, we see it everyday. So the fact that an artist could raise the

moneyto do this is not really a revelation. Itdoesn't constitute a revolutionary use ofthe medium . But if somebody were to setup a system and then turn it overto people,like Kit and Sherrie do, nobody else doesthat, nobody. Sowho in our society is goingto do that? The artist as traditionally un-derstood won't do it .So we need a new practitioner, who

does what I call"metadesign." They createcontext rather than content. An artist canenter the context they create and makecontent, which will now be empoweredand revitalized in away that it could neverhave been empowered beforewithout thecontext that these people set up. To me,this is the new avant-garde : the collabora-tion of the metadesigner and the artist.One not being enough without the other,each needing the other and together con-stituting a whole new force. A context iscreated that can be controlled by the peo-ple who constitute it. Those people mightbe artists whose workwould then be givenan autonomy of context, which it dearlyneeds, which the whole modem history ofart is screaming for. So this is where itgets important.

HP: I'm very intrigued with this idea ofus-ingart to empower otherpeople instead ofusing it to empower yourself.

SR : I don't see the way we create ourpieces as based solely on the fact that youhave to empower people . Thewaywe em-brace the issue is pretty classically art. Ifyoudefine the aesthetic of the medium bydefining what the essence and integrity ofthat medium is, then good art-in thesense of telecommunications-means thatyou create a situation that has to be somekind of communication between people inorder to maximize what that technologycan do. If you're just scripting from one sideto the otherside, you don't need a satellite,you can run two tapes. There has to be thatquality of tension that defines what com-munication is, that higher level, whichwould be, as Gene points out, the conver-sation . And unless you create that tensionin the work, then you're not really lookingat the qualities of the medium, or thequalities of the an.

HP : Were you aware of a televisiorl pro-gram called "The People's Summit" thatfeatured a live studio audience in Seattlehosted by Phil Donahue meeting with alive studio audience in Leningrad hostedby Vladimir Posner?KG : The Phil and Mad show .

SR : That's who we're starting to work withnow, those and others . Not Donahue.

KG : We believe very much in the principleof informal networking, which is alignedwith the new phenomenon of citizendiplomacy. Nowwhen you put that in thecontext of a nationally-rated syndicatedprogram like Donahue, then again it

Gene Youngblood

becomes a spectacle, and it's not really aninformal network. When that happened Ifelt that it was very much a disaster, ill-conceived, ill-executed . The consequen-ces were not all that good . Yet in a contextof ignorance even a gesture in that direc-tion is somewhat healing, or an improve-ment over what existed before .

SR: Everybody, including the Russians, isready for something more interesting,more cultural integration between the Un-ited States and the Soviet Union and alsocultural integration between all of us andthe electronic culture.HP : On the order of Hole-in-Space?KG: There's interest in that. Ourwork withElectronic Cafe was carried to the SovietUnion. They looked at what we did here in-Los Angeles as an international model forcross-cultural communications systems. Icould show you newspaper articles fromPravda where they took the concept andtotally embraced it . They made an Elec-tronic Cafe in Moscow, did some slow-scanand voice-only connections with SanFrancisco .

SR : One of the things we're workingtowards now is the composite-image per-formance similar to what we did in '77(Satellite Arts) . We'll have performers in theSoviet Union and performers in the U.S .meet in this composite-image space, thisvirtual space with no geographical boun-daries, and in that space they'll performtogether and dance together. Dance andperformance doesn't need to be trans-lated. When you start communicating andbeing able to touch and join bodies itcreates a whole other context.

KG : All this sounds very strange, very ex-periential, but if you do this you realizethe communication's power of being ableto mix space or exchange spaces .

"We focus on the livingevent, not being tooconcerned withwhether it's artlike ornot. We don't produceartifacts, we produceliving events that takeplace over a period oftime, to facilitate aquality of human tohuman interaction."

-Kit Galloway

1987/Issue 37/HIGH PERFORMANCE/5 5

Hole-in-Space: A Public CommunicationSculpture, 1980. A three-day, life-size, unan-

nounced, live satellite link allowing spon-taneous interaction between the public on

two coasts . Video cameras and rear-projection screens were installed in displaywindows at Lincoln Center for the Perfor-

mance Arts in New York and The Broadwaydepartment store, Century City, Los Angeles.Each screen displayed life-size, full-figure im-ages of people on the opposite coast. There

were no signs or instructions. Passers-bydrawn to the windows discovered an open

channel through which they could see, hearand talk with people on the other coast

almost as if they were standing on the samestreet corner . Pictured : A womanon screen

from New York City leans forward to visit withsilhouetted people in Los Angeles.

5 6/11K, H NFRFORMANCE/1,,u< , 17/1987

GY: People have kind of a phantom limbsensation, it's actually visceral .SR : The video image becomes the realarchitecture for the performance becausethe image is a place. It's a real place andyour image is your ambassador, and yourtwo ambassadors meet in the image. Ifyouhave a split screen, that defines the kind ofrelationship thatcan take place. If you havean image mix or a key, other relationshipsare possible . So it incorporates all the videoeffects that are used in traditional video art,but it's a live place. It becomes visualarchitecture.KG : A lot of work was done discoveringthings like reversing the scan on the imageso thatwhen the dancer moved tothe right,

.

theimagemoved to the right instead of theleft, and all the special technology that sur-rounded the performers to facilitate this in-teraction. A lot of research and develop-ment went into how fast movement or ac-tivities could take place with the satellitetime delay being present.GY : It needs to be pointed out that they'redoing the same thing that other peoplehave gotten international recognition forinvideo, the Vasulkas for example. Most oftheir life has been this kind of research anddevelopment. They enter the digital do-main and find out what's possible andthey're internationally renowned for doingso. Kit and Sherrie are doing the samething. These are new frontiers and you can'tjust step in and make art automatically, firstyou have to research and find out what'sthere, what's possible, what are the conse-quences. I think it's interesting that every-one recognized that as a value in video, butit has not been recognized so much irotelecommunications . Nam June and DougDavis just step in and make precious worksof art immediately and there's no sense ofexploration or research and development.

KG : NamJune did Good Morning Mr. 0,1-well. Hetook alotoftheworkfrom SatelliteArts without discussing it with us and gaveus a credit on the end. He had Merce Cun-ningham in some studio in NewYork stum-bling in front of a TV monitor that hadn'thad the scan reversed making a fool out ofhimself by his standards, certainly.GY : This addresses the postmodern notionthat what artists do now is not attach them-selves to any particular medium . They justfloat amongst whatever mediums are ap-propriate to whatever they want to say.However, when itcomes tocreating on thiskind of scale, you can't do that. There is on-ly a limited setof technologies thatoperateat that scale and if you want to do some-thing meaningful, something new, youhave to know that tech, you have to get ac-cess to it over extended periods of time,you have to devote your life to it . You can-not come in as a dilletante or aesthete .

KG. We're not about the whole "access"mentality, which often doesn't really culti-vate work. It's like running out, driving astake in uncharted territoryand saying I washere first.SR : The art world in general is pretty impo-tent. I think part of the reason is the wholesense of scale of contemporary society, thescale at which we can destroy ourselves,the little chips that hold how many piecesof information we don't even know,genetic engineering . Really, all the newtechnological developments are out of hu-man scale. The more that we explore spacethe more we feel lonely. It seems to us thatthe only real power is to work at the samescale that contemporary society is workingon . If you don't create on the same scalethat you can destroy, then art is renderedimpotent.

GY : This is what I meant earlier about themetadesigner and the artist together . Theartist is the one who can make the mostpowerful, the most moving represen-tations of our life situation . Yet the formsthat have traditionally been available tothe art world just don't meet the scale ofthe problem. This raises the question ofwhat is political art . My ownopinion is thatthere is no such thing as political art . Thereis art about political issues . But onlysituations are political, only circumstancesare political . So ifyou set up a space bridgeor a hole in space or an electronic cafe as asituation, as a circumstance that spansboundaries of people, and then you putthose poignant, powerful representationsof the artist in there, then you've got both:art that addresses a political issue within apolitical situation. The whole thing be-comes highly political and powerful .

HP: Do you grapple with the issue thatsome people bring up, such as GodfreyReggio, the director of Koyaanisqatsi, thattechnology is inherently evil?

GY: To me it's beneath an answer actually.It's like this book, Four Arguments for theElimination ofTelevision'-remember thatbook? These views are what is called"vitalism." Its like saying in protein there islife . It's voodoo . It doesn't contribute any-thing constructive to what we have to do .KG : It doesn't contribute anything, in fact,it's backpedaling. The fact is if we don'tlearn howto use this technology to managethe human and material resources of thisplanet we're screwed. End of story. Fadeto black.HP: What are your realistic goals with thistechnology?KG : We're not going to realize ourvision inour lifetime, I don't have that much expec-tation, but somebody has to be creatingmodels to liberate people's imaginationsso they can apply them to hope and thepossibility of redefining these technolo-gies . We've gotten to a point where we'verealized the limits of models. We want totake the revolution into the marketplace .We've designed a cost-effective, kickass,multimedia, cross-cultural teleconferenc-ing terminal that will allow communities ofcommon concern to link up and evolvecollectively.HP : Are you talking aboutprovidinga set ofinstructions? Are you talkingabout provid-ing actual hardware?

KG : We're looking at turn-key hardware so-lutions . There have been all these attemptsat networking crosscultu rally but all ofthemtake place using a different set of technol-ogies. Some are cost effective, but most aremade by the teleconferencing industrythat's marketing to the Fortune 500, so themarkup is like tens of thousands of dollarsover the value that's really in the box. Wesee the possibility of creating a turn-key sys-tem thatwould create a compatability stan-dard for a multimedia teleconferencing ter-minal that provides fax, slow-scan, full-motion video, written annotations on pic-tures, pictorial data management, text con-ferencing. We can see putting that togetherat a price that would fall into the small or-ganization price range. That's what we'relooking at right now. The creation of a pilot'network is our first priority because peoplemust have the opportunity to expe7iencesystems like this or like Electronic Cafe tofully realize the indispensible value oftechnology such as this .SR : Thewhole nature of this so-called info-mation and communications society isreally dependent on people synthesizingand being creative . It's almost as ifcapitalism and communism are turning inupon themselves and possibly meeting in anew place. It's determined in part by theprogression of the technology, which isbecoming decentralized, which is becom-ing dependent on c reating this informationeconomy. How do you create information!

When you get right down to it informationis based at some point on somebody's dis-covery or somebody's synthesis or some-body's research and development.GY : I'd like toaddress this . We've been talk-ing about the communications revolution .People take this in one of two ways : eitherit's some kind of '60s, hippie, utopianidealism or it's a marketing scam byindustry-you know, "The communicationrevolution is here, and our product . . ."There has been no middle ground dis-course between those extremes . I wouldjust like to point out that any interestingthing that people like Kit and Sherrie woulddowith this technologywould by definitionhave to be a model of what a com-munications revolution would be like ifthere were one. McLuhan said, "Themedium is the message." What's themedium? Depending on who you talk to,the medium is television, the medium isthis and that . But I always understood it thisway: the medium is a principle, it's not apiece of hardware . The medium is the prin-ciple of centralized, one-way, mass-audi-ence communication. We happen to dothat through broadcastTV, butyou cando itthrough cable TV, you cando it through thetelephone lines . That's the medium, andthat medium is the message. It determinesthat what will be said over a centralized,one-way, mass-audience communicationssystem will have to be said within a verynarrow framework ofwhat is possible, whatwill be accepted by such a mass audience .That is the medium . Arevolution would beto invert that principle through whatevertechnologies permit you to invert it: adecentralized, two-way, special-audiencesystem . Art-world theorists who criticizeanyone who talks about this would haveyou think that this all was attempted in the

- '60s and failed! This is bullshit! The onlything that happened in the '60s is that wegot the vaguest notion that this was evensomething important to think about. Wewoke up in the '60s and nowwe're startingto take the first steps to see what directionthat inversion might lie in. Do we think it'llhappen? That's completely beside thepoint!The point is that this is the only meaningfulthing to do with our lives because we knowthat no other institutions are capable of ad-dressing the problem.KG : The trouble is there haven't beenenough participants to make a major shiftthat would land on the cover of Timemagazine . What we've been trying to do isto get it out into public spaces so that peo-ple participate in these environments. Wecreate the context and invite people tocome in and do their laundry, hang up theirclothes, live there for a while and see whatit's like . To begin to recognize the value of itand to acculturate it for a period of time.Redefine themselves through it .SR : In an art context what we've been doing

"if you look at theaesthetic quality of thecommunication andyou're true to your artform and your art logic,then you very naturallyput one foot in front ofthe other and get tothese places. The artlogic marches youright out of the artinstitutions into life."

-Sherrie Rahinowitz

1987/I"uC 37/HICH PEREORMANCF./ 5 7

Electronic Cafe, July-Sept. 1984 . Called "Oneof the most innovative projects of the Los

Angeles Olympic Arts Festival," officially com-missioned as an Olympic Arts Festival Project

by theMuseum of Contemporary Art(MOCA), Los Angeles. Electronic Cafe linked

MOCA and five ethnically diverse com-munities of Los Angeles through a state-of-the-art telecommunications computer data-base and dial-up image bank designed as a

cross-cultural, multi-lingual network of "crea-tive conversation." From MOCA downtown,

and the real cafes located in the Korean com-munity, Hispanic community, black communi-

ty and beach communities of Los Angeles,people separated by distance could send andreceive slow-scan video images, draw or write

together with an electronic writing tablet,print hard-copy pictures with the video prin-

ter, enter information or ideas in the com-puter database and retrieve it with Communi-ty Memory" keyword search, and store or re-trieve images on a videodisc recorder whichheld 20,000 images . Electronic Cafe ran six

hours a day, six days aweek for seven weeks.Pictured : The Electronic Cafe table at AnaMaria's Restaurant in East Los Angeles.

5 8/ffl(,ff PfR[ORMAN(A/I �ue S7 /1987

is perfectly logical . If the art world has pro-blems with it it's because that logicchallenges the validity of the art institutionsfor this new practice in contemporarysociety.

Fi rstyou look atcommunication and thenyou lookat the aesthetic qualityof the com-munication . As soon as you do that, andyou're true to your art form and your artlogic, not worrying about whether it fits in agallery or on a shelf, then you very naturallyput one foot in front of the other and get tothese places . The art logic just marches youright out of the art institutions into life.HP: What about the communicationspossibilities of videotapes now that every-body's got a VCR?

KG : The great thing about tape rentals isthat they're just knocking the side out ofbroadcast television and cable. It's justknocking them for a loop.GY : Mailing around personal videotapesand the home VCR network is revolution-ary, but the real issue is to have an alterna-tive social world that doesn't stop, that iscontinuous the way television is . Televisionis a social world, it's there 24 hours a day, ithas a history . They're called series, youknow . The news develops a history: "Youknow what happened yesterday, here's theupdate," and so on . So it's a world. Thepoint is to have this alternative social worldthat's always there and never stops and isalways validating itself as a possible socialworld. And then along side of that are allthese other supplementary "periodic"media. I can go to the store and get a tapejust the same as I can go to the store and getMother /ones or Newsweek . But if it wereonly these periodic media, this would notconstitute an alternative social world of anysignificant power. So they're complemen-tary .

H P: The Electronic Cafe ran for over sevenweeks. Why couldn't it have just kept run-ning indefinitely?KG : Nobody wanted it to come down, butwe couldn't perpetuate it because it wasnot cost effective . We put it together withavailable technology and it wasn't the sys-tem to perpetuate . Nowwe've got a systemthat's cost effective .SR: One obvious idea that we've thoughtabout is a new electronic museum . It's away to link people, places and art works inthis new environment.

GY : Electronic Cafe created this new inver-sion ofthe art and life situtation. The longerit ran the more it just became life, right? In asense you could say the less it became art,the more it became life. Orthe shorter it ranthe more it became art, butthe less itwouldbe doing what it ought to really be doing,which is becoming life.

KG : just lookat this as interaction with a sys-tem. It's looking at creativity applied acrossthe boards and at different levels . Eventhough Electronic Cafe had to go away, it'ssuccessful in that it empowered people inthose communities with enough experi-ence to describe what is desirable or whattheywould want as a system . It's politicallyhot, culturally hot. It created a lot of travel,an exchange between these communities,and used Los Angeles as a global model.When you look at the archiving aspect of it,this is important because the face of LosAngeles, the demographics, the dynamicsof it are sowild that the face of history is go-ing to change so fast that there's not goingto be much of a record of it. But when youhave environments where people cancome and register their opinions and ideasand show their stuff and accomplish-ments-little kids breakdancing-what-ever it happened to be, all that can be thereto be looked at underthe context ofa socialspace, it's not private .The other aspect of Electronic Cafe that

was very important was that it created apublic space in which one could participatein telecommunications anonymously. Youcould be among people without anyoneknowing how many kids you have, howmany points you have, what your incomeis. It was like a public telephone booth. Itwasn'tthe privacy ofyourownhome,wherethere's a wire right up your consumer tract.It was a place to present your ideas, registeryour opinions anonymously. You didn'thave to sign your name . The artifacts youcreated-pictures, drawings, writing, com-puter text-either independently or collab-oratively could be, if you desired, per-manently stored in the community-access-ible archive. People could have access toopinions without being monitored. Therealways exists the possibility of being mon-itored when it's in your home . A "com-mons" was created that was very importantin terms of the freedom and what gets to

define our personal freedom in this elec-tronic space.GY : If this isn't political I don't knowwhat is .They gave people a living experience ofone of the hottest political issues of ourtime-how can we move into electronicspace and still be anonymous? Are we go-ing to be anonymous? Is anyone even talk-ing about that? Has the issue even comeup? No . You gotta join The Source, you gotto give all your data to CompuServe .Anonymity is a possibiity that could justvanish, except for those people in East L.A .now who've had that experience, who aretherefore much hipper than probably mostof the consultants to AT&T who neverthought . . .

FOOTNOTES1 . Youngblood discusses the creative conversationthusly : "To create new realities, we must create newcontexts, new domains of consensus. That can't bedone through communication. You can't step out ofthe context that defines communication by communi-cating; it will only lead to trivial permutations withinthe same consensus, repeatedly validating the samereality . Instead we need a creative conversation thatmight lead to new consensus and hence to new reali-ties, butwhich is notitself a process of communication.

I say something you don't understand and we beginturning around together: 'Do you mean this or this?''No, I mean thus and such . . .' During this nontrivialprocess we gradually approximate the possibility ofcommunications, which will follow as a trivial neces-sary consequence oncewe've constructed a new con-sensus and woven together a new context . Communi-cation, as a domain of stabilized noncreative relations,can occur only after the creative (but noncommunica-tive) conversation that makes it possible : communica-tion is always noncreative and creativity is always non-communicative . Conversation, the paradigm of allgenerative phenomena, the prerequisite for allcreativity, requires a two-way channel of interaction.That doesn't guarantee creativity, but without it therewill be no conversation at all, and creativity will bediminished accordingly." Excerpted from "VirtualSpace: The Electronic Environments of Mobile Image,"by Gene Youngblood, IS fournal ,y1, 1986 .2. Jerry Mander, FourArguments forthe Elimination ofTelevision, New York : William Morrow, 1978.

A SELECTIVE RESUME OF MOBILE IMAGEBiennale of Venice, Italy, 1986 . Part of the"Art, Technology and Informatics" Exhibi-tion . Three evenings of slow-scan videotransmitted from Mobile Image's studio inSanta Monica, California, and projected . liveon large screens in the exhibition hag inVenice, Italy .

Electronic Cafe, July-Sept. 1984 .

Professor/ Instructors, University of Califor',nia LosAngeles (UCLA), 1983 . School ofMo-tionon Picture/Television . Graduate level,course : "Experimental TV."

Aesthetic Research in Tele-communications(ART-COM), Loyola Marymount University,1982 . Designed and taught full semestermulti-disciplinary laboratory examining theeffects, potentials and future of interactivevideo.

Hole-in-Space, 1981 . 30-minute award-winning documentary.

Hole-in-Space: A Public CommunicationsSculpture, 1980.

Satellite Arts Project, 1978 . 30-minuteaward winning documentary.

Satellite Arts Project, 1977 .

Exhibitions and lectures include: VeniceBiennale, Italy; Museum of ContemporaryArt, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art,NewYork; San Francisco Museum of ModernArt; Long Beach Museum of Art; The Kitchen,New York ; American Film Institute, LosAngeles; Tokyo Video Festival ; AmericanCenter, Paris; Avignon International ArtsFestival .

Grants and support include: Times MirrorCorp., Museum of Contemporary Art, Hon-eywell Corp ., National Endowment for theArts, American Film Institute, Sony Corp .,NASA, Corporation for Public Broadcasting,Western Union, General Electric .

Aesthetic Research in Tele-communications(ART-COM), 1982

"The fact is if we don'tlearn how to use thistechnology to managethe human and materialresources of this planetwe're screwed. End ofstory. Fade to black."

-Kit Galloway

1987/I,,uv 47/111( ;11 PrRF()RMANCC/59