EventsCalendar

The 40th Anniversary Telebration of Hole-in-Space: A Public Communications Sculpture (1980) by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz: Kit Galloway (Lecture)

date
11.13.20
time
05:00am
location

The 40th Anniversary Telebration of Hole-in-Space: A Public Communications Sculpture (1980) by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz

A telematic art event with key importance for the future of media arts was organized November 12-14, 1980 between Century City in Los Angeles and the Lincoln Center in New York. Making the impossible possible, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz created a futuristic communications infrastructure that connected two public outdoor spaces in real time, opening up a possibility for everyone to create together across the continent and to share experiences in a never-before-seen collaborative virtual space.

DMA is proud to host the legendary artist Kit Galloway to celebrate this truly momentous feat. Please join Kit to hear how it was achieved and to see rare documents from the archives of Electronic Café International (ECI), the center and network for online art collaborations Galloway and Rabinowitz founded. The event will also commemorate the achievements of Sherrie Rabinowitz (1950-2013), an extraordinary artist who pioneered - together with Kit - the field of collaborative interactive online media art.

Time: November 13, 2020, 1:30pm - 2:30pm.

About Sherrie Rabinowitz & Kit Galloway:

Sherrie and Kit were introduced by their mutual friend, the philosopher Felix Guattari, in Paris in 1975. They defined their sociopolitical interests in human-to-human telecollaborative environments as ‘Avantpreneuring’. Gene Youngblood called them metadesigners. Sherrie and Kit asked: “Is there something beyond art and industry that has not been explored yet?” The answers became a living history of media arts.

Using a NASA communications satellite, Sherrie and Kit created in 1977 The Satellite-Arts Project, the first tele-immersive virtual space, which defined “The Image as Place.” Hole in Space followed in 1980. Sherrie and Kit also taught multidisciplinary classes in telepresence at the Loyola Marymount University (1982) and a graduate class at UCLA on “Experimental Television” (1983). In 1984, they recruited students to take part in the creation of their Electronic Cafe Network that connected culturally and linguistically diverse communities across Los Angeles during the 1984 Olympics Arts Festival.

Between 1988-2000 Kit and Sherrie built the first permanent ‘always on’ Global Telecollaboratory network: the Electronic Cafe International (ECI). A legacy of their technological firsts and achievements is too long to be catalogued here. Their visionary approximations have been referred to as “new ways of being-in-the-world.” The dazzling array of today’s technology has not yet caught up with Sherrie’s and Kit’s aspirations for an inhabitable global telecollaborative network that can sensibly and wisely manage the human, animal, material, and environmental resources of this planet.

Sherrie Rabinowitz passed away in 2013. Kit Galloway lives on a horse ranch at Pinon Hills in the High Desert of the Mojave.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Caf%C3%A9_International . See also: http://ecafe.com/museum/history/ksoverview2.html . Further reading: Philip Glahn and Cary Levine, “The Future Is Present: “Electronic Cafe and the Politics of Technological Fantasy,” Art Journal, 2019, http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=12492

Sign up here: