Telematic art is a descriptive of art projects using computer-mediated
telecommunications
Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of ...
networks as their medium. Telematic art challenges the traditional relationship between active viewing subjects and passive art objects by creating interactive, behavioural contexts for remote aesthetic encounters. ''Telematics'' was first coined by Simon Nora and
Alain Minc
Alain Minc (; born 15 April 1949) is a French businessman, political advisor and author.
Biography
Early life
Alain Minc was born on April 15, 1949, in Paris to a family of Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father, Joseph Minkowski, was a den ...
in ''The Computerization of Society''.
Roy Ascott
Roy Ascott FRSA (born 26 October 1934) is a British artist, who works with cybernetics and telematics on an art he calls technoetics by focusing on the impact of digital and telecommunications networks on consciousness. Since the 1960s, Ascott ...
sees the telematic art form as the transformation of the viewer into an active participator of creating the artwork which remains in process throughout its duration. Ascott has been at the forefront of the theory and practice of telematic art since 1978 when he went online for the first time, organizing different collaborative online projects.
Pioneering experiments
Although Ascott was the first person to name this phenomenon, the first use of telecommunications as an artistic medium has occurred in 1922 when the Hungarian constructivist artist
László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy (; ; born László Weisz; July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Kingdom of Hungary, Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by Constructivism (art), con ...
made the work ''Telephone Pictures''. This work questioned the idea of the isolated individual artist and the unique art object. In 1932,
Bertold Brecht
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known as Bertolt Brecht and Bert Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a ...
emphasized the idea of telecommunications as an artistic medium in his essay 'The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication'. In this essay, Brecht advocated the two-way communication for radio to give the public the power of
representation and to pull it away from the control of corporate
media
Media may refer to:
Communication
* Means of communication, tools and channels used to deliver information or data
** Advertising media, various media, content, buying and placement for advertising
** Interactive media, media that is inter ...
. Art historian
Edward A. Shanken has authored several historical accounts of telematic art, including ''From Cybernetics to Telematics: The Art, Pedagogy, and Theory of Roy Ascott''.
In 1977, 'Satellite Arts Project' by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz used satellites to connect artists on the east and west coast of the United States. This was the first time that artists were connected in a
telematic
Telematics is an interdisciplinary field encompassing telecommunications, vehicular technologies (road transport, road safety, etc.), electrical engineering (sensors, instrumentation, wireless communications, etc.), and computer science (multimedia ...
way. With the support of
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...
, the artists produced composite images of participants, enabling an interactive dance concert amongst geographically disparate performers. An estimated audience of 25,000 saw bi-coastal discussions on the impact of new technologies on art, and improvised, interactive dance and music performances that were mixed together in real time creating a live composited image allowing the East and West performers to share and co-inhabit the entire video screen. These first satellite works emphasized the primacy of process that remained central to the theory and practice of telematic art.
Ascott used
telematics
Telematics is an interdisciplinary field encompassing telecommunications, vehicular technologies (road transport, road safety, etc.), electrical engineering (sensors, instrumentation, wireless communications, etc.), and computer science (multimedia ...
for the first time in 1978 when he organized a computer-conferencing project between the United States and the United Kingdom called ''Terminal Art''. For this project, he used
Jacques Vallée
Jacques Fabrice Vallée (; born September 24, 1939) is an Internet pioneer, computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, ufologist and astronomer currently residing in San Francisco, California and Paris, France.
His scientific career bega ...
's Infomedia Notepad System, which made it possible for the users to retrieve and add information stored in the computer’s memory. This made it possible to interact with a group of people to make "aesthetic encounters more participatory, culturally diverse, and richly layered with meaning". Ascott did more similar projects like ''Ten Wings,'' which was part of Robert Adrian’s ''The World in 24 Hours'' in 1982. An important telematic artwork of Ascott is ''La Plissure du Texte'' from 1983, which allowed Ascott and other artists to participate in collectively creating texts to an emerging story by using computer networking. This participation has been termed as 'distributed authorship'. But the most significant matter of this project is the
interactivity
Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but ...
of the artwork and the way it breaks the barriers of time and space. In the late 1980s, the interest in this kind of project using computer networking expanded, especially with the release of the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...
in the early 1990s.
French side story
Thanks to the
Minitel
The Minitel, officially known as TELETEL, was an interactive videotex online service accessible through telephone lines. It was the world's first and most successful mass-market online service prior to the World Wide Web. It was developed in Ces ...
, France had a public telematic infrastructure more than a decade before the emergence of the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...
in 1994. This enabled a different style of telematic art than the point-to-point technologies to which other locations were limited in the 1970s and 1980s. As reported by
Don Foresta,
Karen O'Rourke, and Gilbertto Prado, several French artists made some collective art experiments using the Minitel, among them Jean-Claude Anglade, Jacques-Elie Chabert, Frédéric Develay, Jean-Marc Philippe,
Fred Forest, Marc Denjean and Olivier Auber. These mostly-forgotten experiments (with notable exceptions like the still-active
Poietic Generator) foreshadowed later web applications, especially the
social networks
A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of meth ...
such as
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
and
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
, even as they offered theoretical critiques of them.
Pop culture and mass media
Telematic art is now being used more frequently by televised performers. Shows such as ''American Idol'' that are based highly form viewer polls incorporate telematic art. This type of consumer applications is now grouped under the term "
transmedia
Transmedia storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling) is the technique of adapting a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.
From a product ...
".
See also
*
Planetary Collegium
The Planetary Collegium (a.k.a. CAiiA / Centre for Advanced Inquiry in Integrative Arts) is an international transcultural and transdisciplinary new media art educational research platform that promotes on the doctorate level the integration of ar ...
*
Poietic Generator
References
Further reading
* Ascott, Roy(2003).''Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness.'' (Ed.)
Edward A. Shanken. Berkeley, CA:University of California Press.
*Ascott, R. 2002. ''Technoetic Arts'' (Editor and Korean translation: YI, Won-Kon), (Media & Art Series no. 6, Institute of Media Art, Yonsei University). Yonsei: Yonsei University Press
* Ascott, R. 1998. ''Art & Telematics: toward the Construction of New Aesthetics''. (Japanese trans. E. Fujihara). A. Takada & Y. Yamashita eds. Tokyo: NTT Publishing Co., Ltd.
* O'Rourke, K., ed. 1992. ''Art-Réseaux'' (with articles in English by Roy Ascott, Carlos Fadon Vicente, Mathias Fuchs, Eduardo Kac, Paulo Laurentiz, Artur Matuck, Frank Popper, and Stephen Wilson) Paris, Editions du CERAP.
*Shanken Edward A. 2000, ''Tele-Agency: Telematics, Telerobotics, and the Art of Meaning.'' Art Journal, issue 2 2000.
External links
Telematic Connections
{{DEFAULTSORT:Telematic Art
Digital art