A Conversation and Two Epilogues

When Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz arrived in Telluride for Tele-Community in the summer of 1993, it seemed as if the whole town joined them on Main Street, as using slow scan video they connected townspeople and visiting digerati with artists, universities, and cultural centers around the world. Their Electronic Café had already presented New York City pedestrians with display windows of people waving and talking real time from Los Angeles (...

trAce Online Writing Centre, Nottingham Trent University, UK

The trAce Online Writing Centre was founded in 1995 by Sue Thomas at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Over the next decade trAce expanded along with the web, evolving organically and somewhat haphazardly into a vast interlinked network created by many different artists, authors and researchers, during a period of rapid technological change. What emerged was one of the web’s earliest and most influential international creative communities. This chapter outlines the historical context, complex media ecology, diverse membership, wide-ranging influences, and vast and varied output of trAce, much of which has been collected together in a unique archive which can be explored online here: <http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/>

Arts Wire: The Nonprofit Arts Online

Beginning in 1992, Arts Wire, a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts, was a social media platform and Internet presence provider, that provided access to news, information, and dialogue on the social, economic, philosophical, intellectual, and political conditions affecting the arts and artists. Initially led by Anne Focke and then by poet, Joe Matuzak, Arts Wire participants included individual artists, arts administrators, arts organizations and funders. This chapter focuses on Arts Wire's social media aspects, such as discussion and projects, including among others: AIDSwire, an online AIDS information resource; the online component of the Fourth National Black Writers Conference; the Native Arts Network Association; ProjectArtNet that brought children from immigrant neighborhoods online to create a community history; NewMusNet, a virtual place for experimental music; and Interactive, an online laboratory for interactive art. It also documents the history of the e-newsletter, Arts Wire Current (later NYFA Current).

Cultures in Cyberspace: Communications System Design as Social Sculpture

Cultures in Cyberspace was a temporary communications network organized by the author in 1992 to connect five culturally diverse online communities in conversation: American Indian Telecommunications/Dakota BBS (US), Arts Wire (US), ArtsNet (Australia), the WELL (US), and Usenet (international). Produced at a time of impending transformational technological change, the project provided a platform for people to participate in co-creating cyberspace, bringing their cultural backgrounds, stories and histories to the table. Cultures in Cyberspace was based on the premise that social, political and cultural meanings are made possible or not depending on who is connected to whom and the forms of communication that are supported and prioritized. The chapter discusses the art practices and socio-political context that informed the project, as well as its concept, design, implementation, and content. It includes participants' contemporary reflections on questions raised by the project.

Community Networking: The Native American Telecommunications Continuum

Community Networking -- The Native American Telecommunications Continuum Computer mediated communications -- has evolved exponentially each decade since the mid-1980’s. Pre-Internet exploration in the era of FidoNet and supported by dial-up modem equipment running over x.25 exchange switching does not seem possible to have existed at all. With three decades of change to reflect upon, questions remain today about whether the impact of technology and telecommunications has advanced tribal nationhood.

Dictation: A Canadian Perspective on the History of Telematic Art

Canada, with its vast distances, was an early adopter of communications technologies. Starting in the 1970s, Canadian artists pursued the aesthetic strategies of correspondence art, video, telecommunications, and artist-run centers. Beginning with Bill Bartlett's Brechtian credo that real communication must be interactive, and noting Robert Filliou's influential concept of the “Eternal Network,” Hank Bull tells the story of a small group of artists who tested the potentials and implications of telecommunications art. He discusses radio, slowscan video, electronic mail and fax art, referring to specific projects produced for Ars Electronica (1983), Electra (Paris, 1983) and the Venice Biennale (1986). More recently, Shanghai Fax (1996), staged by Bull, with artists Shen Fan, Ding Yi, and Shi Yong, was one of the first international group exhibitions to take place in China since the revolution. In conclusion Bull emphasizes sympathetic listening in this new territory, where unfamiliar noises clash as new rhythms sound.

Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place

Reprinted from legendary cyberspace pioneer Howard Rheingold's classic, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, “Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place” situates the reader in the context of social media before the World Wide Web. Rheingold narrates how he became involved in The WELL community; details community and personalities on The WELL; and documents user experience with the WELL's conferencing system, including how conversations are created and organized and how social media compares to face to face dialog. Rheingold also explores social media-based dialog in terms of reciprocity; “elegantly presented knowledge”; the tradition of conversation in the Athenian agora; and the value of freedom of expression. Introduced by Judy Malloy.

The Origins of Social Media

In the formative years of the Internet, researchers collaboratively connected computing systems with a goal of sharing research and computing resources. The model process with which they created the Internet and its forefather, the ARPANET, was echoed in early social media platforms, where creative computer scientists, artists, writers, musicians educators explored the promise of computer-based platforms to bring together communities of interest in what would be called “cyberspace.” With a focus on the arts and humanities, this introduction traces the development of social media affordances in applications such as email, mailing lists, BBSs, the Community Memory, PLATO, Usenet, mail art, telematic art, and video communication. The author outlines the early social media platforms documented in each chapter in this book and summarizes how the book's epilogues both explore differences between early and contemporary social media and look to the future of the arts in social media.

From Archaeology to Architecture: Building a Place for Noncommercial Culture Online

This chapter examines various approaches to ensuring a place for nonprofit culture online, drawing from the various noncommercial networking projects discussed elsewhere in the anthology, as well as the 1990’s National Information Infrastructure policy debates in the U.S. and subsequent private-sector efforts. It discusses the key elements required for a broadly collaborative effort to (1) identify, cultivate, and promote the digital art resources that already exist; (2) develop new online projects; and (3) weave these resources together in a fashion that allows both online and offline arts activities to receive the serious attention to study they deserve. In addition to enhanced public sector leadership and expanded private sector support, the chapter calls for a more systematic application of curatorial expertise to the online sector, along with substantial grassroots participation in identifying the most reliable cultural resources that are too often lost in the vast expanses of the commercialized Internet today.

Expanding on “What Is the Social in Social Media?”: A Conversation with Geert Lovink

In 1995, Geert Lovink started <nettime> with Pit Schultz. It expanded into many lists and languages and in the process demonstrated that English language and American-centric platforms do not have to be the lingua franca of the Internet. Lovink's contemporary work with the Institute of Network Cultures and its research networks, such as Unlike Us, has shaped a coalition that explores network architectures, the role of collective production, aesthetic tactics, and diverse, open information exchange. This introduction to the Epilogues focuses on his 2012 essay in e-flux -- “What Is the Social in Social Media?” -- asking three questions: Can you expand on what roles you envision for artists and writers in contemporary social media? How can we teach students to create in a difficult medium that so beautifully (and relentlessly) combines text, image, design, interactivity and collaboration? And how do you envision a social media of the future?