Overview of network art projects 1921-1984
 

Year	Event	Venue	Artists	Details
1921	Manuel Maples Arce's first manifesto Actual número 1, appears in Mexico City	Mexico	Estridentistas	Various literature over the period 1921-1927, notable for use of modern communication network imagery (telegraphs, radio, railroad, etc.), particularly in poetry, that responded critically to European futurisms.

1922	"Telephone Paintings"		László Moholy-Nagy

1955	Ray Johnson undertakes early mail art activities	New York City	Ray Johnson	Johnson had a substantial mailing list (of some two hundred art world and poular culture figures) to whom he begins sending moticos, cutouts on black paper resembling modern hieroglyphics. These mail art activities became known as The New York Correspondance School in 1962.	W

1961	Planning begins for Fluxus magazine		George Maciunas and Dick Higgins	Conceived partly in response to the perceived need for a distribution mechanism for artists' work. In 1964 and 1968, Fluxus periodicals Fluxus I and Fluxus II appeared, assembled by Maciunas. The idea of the periodical expaned, offering new and interactive performative-based experiences for the viewer/participant. Fluxus yearbooks, yearboxes, and Fluxkits were also published.

1962	"Utopian Laser Television" manifesto	New York City	Nam June Paik	Proposed a new communications medium based on hundreds of TV channels, with each channel narrowcasting to an audience of those who want it, without regard to the size of the audience.	W
1962-1963	Yam Festivals and Yam Festival Delivery Event	New York City metropolitan area	George Brecht and Robert Watts, coordinators	Festivals were a series of events in a "loose format that would make it possible to combine or include an ever-expanding universe of events." In the delivery event, it is announced that th coordinators will "assemble a work and arrange delivery to you or an addressee of your choice."	W

1962-1963	Yam Festivals and Yam Festival Delivery Event	New York City metropolitan area	George Brecht and Robert Watts, coordinators	Festivals were a series of events in a "loose format that would make it possible to combine or include an ever-expanding universe of events." In the delivery event, it is announced that th coordinators will "assemble a work and arrange delivery to you or an addressee of your choice."	W

1968	Dial-a-Poem	New York City	John Giorno	Answering machines function as a venue for "randomly accessible creative expression."	W
1968	Art by Telephone exhibition	Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago	Siah Armajani, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Iain Baxter, Mel Bochner, Geoge Brecht, Jack Burnham, James Lee Byars, Robert H. Cumming, Francoise Dallegret, Jan Dibbets, John Giorno, Robert Grosvenor, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Dick Higgins, Davi Det Hompson, Robert Huot, Alani Jacquet, Ed Kienholz, Joseph Kosuth, Les Levine, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Guenther Uecker, Stan Van Der Beek, Bernar Venet, Frank Lincoln, Viner Wolf Vostell, William Wegman, William T. Wiley	Shortly after its opening, the Museum of Contemporary Art planned an exhibition to record the trend, incipient then and pervasive today, toward conceptualization of art. This exhibition, scheduled for the spring of 1968 and abandoned because of technical difficulties, consisted of works in different media, conceived by artists in this country and Europe and executed in Chicago on their behalf. The telephone was designated the most fitting means of communication in relaying instructions to those entrusted with fabrication of the artists' projects or enactment of their ideas. To heighten the challenge of a wholly verbal exchange, drawings, blueprints or written descriptions were avoided. -Jan van der Marck	W

1969	Omnibus News appears	based in Munich	Contributors from eight countries; Thomas Niggl, Christian d'Orville, and Heimrad Prem, editors	Interested individuals are invited to submit copies of their single-page contributions, which were accepted with no editing or censorship. The contributors were then assembled into a periodical of approximately 200 bond pages. Copies were distributed back to artists and via other channels.
1969	Telex art	Canada	N.E. Thing Co., Ltd. (Iain and Ingrid Baxter)	Registered "company" used telex to establish a "virtual identity" as well as to send instructions to remote galleries and museums on how to set up its pieces.
Sep 1969	Prototype of the Internet (ARPANET) successfully tested	University of California at Los Angeles and participating institutions	Researchers and scientists at the participating institutions	Development of interface message processors allows different remote systems and programs to communicate with one another. (The ARPA in ARPANET ws the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense.)	W
Jan 1969-Jul 1994	Duration Piece No. 13	primarily U.S.	Douglas Huebler	One hundred one dollar notes were circulated accompanied by a letter saying that anyone sending the note back to Huebler will receive $1,000 in return.
1969	Wipe Cycle	Howard Wise Gallery in New York City	Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider	First exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York in 1969 ("TV as a Creative Medium?"). It consisted of nine monitors whose displays were controlled by synchronized cycle patterns of live and delayed feedback, broadcast television, and taped programming shot by Gillette and Schneider with portable equipment. These were displayed through alternations of four programmed pulse signals every two, four, eight, and sixteen seconds. Separately, each of the cycles acted as a layer of video information, while all four levels in concert determined the overall composition of the work at any given moment.	W

1970	Labyrinth	Jewish Museum, New York City	Ted Nelson and Ned Woodman	Interactive catalogue for Jack Burnham's Software exhibition. Early hypertext system allowed participants to browse, gather information about the exhibit, then print out an individually profiled search record.	W
20 Sep-6 Oct 1970	Ray Johnson: New York Correspondance School exhibition	Whitney Museum of Art	Ray Johnson's New York Correspondance School correspondents; Ray Johnson and Marcia Tucker, cocurators	Exhibition included everything sent to the museum in response to an invitation Johnson sent out to his correspondents.
1970-1971	Notebook I (1970) and Space Atlas (1971) appear	U.S. and Canada	Dana Atchley, editor	Described as "community notebooks assembling." The first of these periodicals contains works by 60 contributors; the second comprise 120, from seven countries. Copies of each were distributed evenly among contributors.	W
1970	Conspiracy 8	Guggenheim Museum, New York City - MIT, Boston	Gordon Mumma	Collaborative project by Mumma and Stephen Smoliar, then a doctoral candidate in applied mathematics at the MIT. The present recording documents it's February 20, 1970, premiere at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of MIT, with Mumma performing on a bowed musical saw processed sporadically with cybersonics, and Smoliar at the audible teletype console, communicating in real time with a large PDP-6 computer.	W

1970-1971	Notebook I (1970) and Space Atlas (1971) appear	U.S. and Canada	Dana Atchley, editor	Described as "community notebooks assembling." The first of these periodicals contains works by 60 contributors; the second comprise 120, from seven countries. Copies of each were distributed evenly among contributors.	W
1971	NET manifesto published	originated in Poland	Jaroslaw Kozlowski (a director of an alternative gallery) and Andrzej Kostolowski (a critic), authors	Outlined as a new strategy of networking for artists in which an open strategy of networking is central. Mailed to 189 international artists, who are invited to be cocurators of the proposed NET. Reissued in 1972.	W
1971-1972	Town Fool Project	Victoria, British Columbia, Canada	Anna Freud Banana	Tables set up at local gatherings combining parody with market systems. Included distributing degrees in Bananalogy, via mail art networks, and playful network dramas about buying and selling.	W

1971-1972	Town Fool Project	Victoria, British Columbia, Canada	Anna Freud Banana	Tables set up at local gatherings combining parody with market systems. Included distributing degrees in Bananalogy, via mail art networks, and playful network dramas about buying and selling.	W
1972	Media Suitcase installation	documentas, Kassel, Germany	Gottfried Bechtold	Collection of various media, ranging from photography and slide through to Super8 and unrecorded videotape; buyers were directed to use the videotape for filming, thereby extending the archive.

1973	Aloha From Hawaii via satellite	Hawaii	Elvis Presley	First music concert broadcast live via satellite around the world.

1974-1982	Advertisements for creation of artificial aurora borealis	Brazilian and U.S. publications	Paulo Bruscky	Ads placed in newspapers to circulate and document a proposed project to create an artificial aurora borealis, using airplanes to color cloud formations.

29 Dec 1976	Seven Thoughts	Houston Astrodome	Douglas Davis	With the support of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Douglas Davis performs "Seven Thoughts" in the empty Houston Astrodome. Davis: "In the last ten minutes of this 30-minute piece, I spoke up from the floor of the dome to the orbiting satellite above and sent the thoughts, one by one, to every IntelSat station on earth. It was probably the first use of the satellite by a single person for artmaking purposes. To the best of my knowledge only one nation, india, allowed the thoughts to be heard over radio. But the point was not to reach a big audience. The point was to do it at all...And let the news get out (that long-distance broadcasting was not an exclusive preserve of tv networks, armies, and governments)."	W

1977	Happening promoted through mail art	Ricerche Inter/Media Centro Autogestito di Attivita Espressive, Ferrara, Italy	Paulo Bruscky	27 citizens of Ferrara received by mail a section of a work by Bruscky, divided into 27 parts, to be reassembled by the recipients.
1977	Satellite Arts (The Image as Place)	U.S. East and West Coasts, linked via NASA satellite	Kit Galloway, Sherrie Rabinowitz and Mobilus dancers	The first use of audiovisual composite imaging for a performance-based telecommunications telecollaboration and an emulation of immersive and virtual-image space/place. Two groups of dancers in two outdoor locations three thousand miles apart were linked, over four days, in a performance space "with no geographical boundaries".	W
1977	Flyer circulated soliciting artists' work for new assembling magazine, Commonpress	Varied with participants	Various; Pawel Petasz, central coordinator of issues	Further development in models of participatory publishing, with participants each taking a turn at collecting materials, editing, printing and distributing issues, at their own expense. More than 60 issues were published between 1977 and 1990.
1977	Early performance of networked computer music	Mills College, Oakland, California	Jim Horton, Rich Gold	KIM computers linked together for a performance in which Gold interacted with his artificial-language program while Horton ran an early algorithmic piece.
Feb 1977	Four places two figures one ghost	Whitney Museum of Arts	Douglas Davis	A performance "which was simultaneously cablecast to a large live audience outside the walls of the museum".
24 Jul 1977	The Last Nine Minutes	Documenta 6, Kassel	Douglas Davis, Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys	Live performance for international satellite telecast. This performance, presented for German TV's first live satellite transmission marking the opening of the Documenta VI in Kassel, is a continuation of Douglas Davis' works on telecommunication. His exhortations of the viewers to establish contact with him via the TV screen are made all the more pointed by the physical distance between two continents. Davis was preceded by two 10-minute performances by Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys respectively. Broadcasted by West German TV to many countries, including the USSR.	W
10-11 Sep 1977	Two-Way-Demo: Send/Receive	New York City - San Francisco	Liza Bear, Keith Sonnier, Willoughby Sharp	The live 2.5-hour broadcast between New York and San Francisco. Put into position in 1976, the NASA Satellite CTS is used for the occasion. The New York-based station, MCTV, receives a cable signal by satellite. Other participating artists included Andy Horowitz (alongside the organizers on the East Coast), and Sharon Grace, Carl Loeffler and Terry Fox on the West Coast. The broadcast consisted of discussion and debate, readings, and prerecorded video footage. The broadcast reaches almost 25,000 spectators.	W
1977	WorldPool	Toronto - New York City	Norman White, Judith Doyle, Willoughby Sharp	Experiments with fax exchanges.	W

1978	Duo for KIMs developed	-	Jim Horton, John Bischoff	Occasional tones of one machine caused other to transpose its melodic activity accordingly.
1978	"The Form: 1970-1979" distributed	Palo Alto, California; Union City, California; Mills College Art Gallery Oakland, California	Melody Sumner Carnahan, Michael Sumner; participants included Richard Kostelanetz, Andy Warhol, John Cage, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Ruby Ray, Dick Higgins, Throbbing Gristle, and Vito Acconci	Form comprising a list of the years 1970-1979, each followed by a blank line was distributed to 100 work colleagues, friends, and relatives, as well as strangers (artists, writers, politicians, etc.) Recipients were asked to fill it in and return it. Completed forms eventually became a book, Form, and were displayed in a 1980 exhibition.
Spring 1978	Performance of networked computers	Artist-run space The Blind Lemon, Berkeley, California	Jim Horton, John Bischoff, Rich Gold	Networked trio of computers. Other performances followed. Trio evolved into group, The League of Automatic Music Composers.
1978, 1979	Broadcast of sound poems and sound works by various artists	Recife, Brazil	Paulo Bruscky, initiator; sound works by various artists, including John Cage	Broadcast on mainstream Recife radio station during winter arts festivals.
1978		Open Space Gallery, Victoria, Canada - NYC, Memphis, Toronto, Oakland, Vancouver, San Diego and San Francisco.		Open Space Gallery in Victoria, Canada, conducts several live Slow-Scan video transmissions with other groups of artists in New York City, Memphis, Toronto, Oakland, Vancouver, San Diego and San Francisco.

1978, 1979	Broadcast of sound poems and sound works by various artists	Recife, Brazil	Paulo Bruscky, initiator; sound works by various artists, including John Cage	Broadcast on mainstream Recife radio station during winter arts festivals.
Spring 1979	Biweekly presentations of performances using networked computers	Finnish Hall, Berkeley, California, under auspices of East Bay Center for the Performing Arts	The League of Automatic Music Composers	Presentations over the course of five months offered audience "computer-generated sonic landscapes" and allowed participation by other artists. Following conclusion of this series of presentations members of the group continued to develop the network music form, plaing widely around the Bay Area.
1979	PacRim Slow Scan Project	Vancouver	Bill Bartlett, organiser, with other artists	Satellite link via slow-scan and the NASA ATS-1 Peacesat network.
1979	"Interplay" computer communications conference	Toronto, Vienna	Bill Bartlett (Toronto), Robert Adrian X, Richard Kriesche, Heidi Grundmann, and Gottfried Bach (Vienna)	Studio at Austrian TV is set up and news is read live in a radio program transmission, Art Today.
1979	Audio Scene 79	Modern Art Galerie, Vienna

Early 1980s	Banana Rag begins operating as mail art forum and news source zine	Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada	Anna Freud Banana	Hand-drawn and -printed periodical distributed via mail networks. Associated with mail art network.	W
1980	Hole-in-Space, A Public Communication Sculpture	New York (Lincoln Center) - Los Angeles (Broadway department store, Century City)	Kit Galloway, Sherrie Rabinowitz	Live satellite communications were used over three days to create a new social space linking public on the streets of the two citis, each interacting with the public in the other city via screens in shop windows.	W
16 Feb 1980	Artists' Use of Telecommunications Conference	CAMBRIDGE (USA): Center for Advanced Visual Studies/M.I.T. (Aldo Tambellini etc.) HAWAII: University Art Department (John Southworth etc.) JAPAN: Tsukuba University (Michael Goldberg etc.) NEW YORK: 1. Alternative Media Center/New York City University (Douglas Davis, Martin Neisenholtz etc.) 2. Center for New Art Activities (Willoughby Sharp, Lisa Bear) SAN FRANCISCO: La Mamelle & San Franscisco Museum of Modern Art (Bill Bartlett, Carl Loeffler (Org.) with Liza Bear, Sharon Grace, Gene Youngblood) TORONTO: Trinity Video and Ontario College of Art (Norman White etc.) VANCOUVER: Western Front Society (Hank Bull, Kate Craig, Glen Lewis etc.) VICTORIA (Canada): I.P. Sharp Ass. (Mike Powell etc.) VIENNA: Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts (Robert Adrian, Grita Insam (Org.) with Ernst Caramelle, Valie Export, Karl Kowanz, Richard Kriesche, Helmut Mark & Peter Weibel.)	Organised by Bill Bartlett and Carl Loeffler	Participants in Vienna, Tokyo, Vancouver, Hawaii, New York, Boston, and San Francisco were brought together using IP Sharp APL Timesharing System and either a worldwide teleconference linkup or slow-scan TV and Audiolink.	W
1980-1981	Publication of periodical Artforum begins	Poland	Various contributors to each issue and Pawel Petasz	Contributors to this magazine of mail art and ephemeral art receive issues consisting of a single sheet of homemade paper on which is typed a "table of contents" listing the submissions that have gone into the issue-literally, in this case, as Petasz pulps the contributions and produces the paper on which the contents list of printed. The print run for each issue is determined by the number and size of contributions. Title is a play on that of the influential art world publication, Art Forum.

31 Oct 1981	Artistic fax transmission	Recife and Sao Paulo, Brazil	Paulo Bruscky, Roberto Sandoval	Transmission took place between Broscky in Recife and Sandoval in Sao Paulo. Documentation of transmission was exhibited in Arte Novos Meios/Multimedios (New Media/Multimedia Art), FAAP, Sao Paulo, 1985. Other fax performances incorporated Bruscky's earlier electrocardiogram "drawings," etc.
1980-1981	Publication of periodical Artforum begins	Poland	Various contributors to each issue and Pawel Petasz	Contributors to this magazine of mail art and ephemeral art receive issues consisting of a single sheet of homemade paper on which is typed a "table of contents" listing the submissions that have gone into the issue-literally, in this case, as Petasz pulps the contributions and produces the paper on which the contents list of printed. The print run for each issue is determined by the number and size of contributions. Title is a play on that of the influential art world publication, Art Forum.
1981	Paper Tiger Television appears on Manhattan cable	Public-access cable channels across the U.S.	Collective comprising artists, activits, and academics, early initiators and participants included Dee Dee Halleck, Diana Agosta, Pennee Bender, Caryn Rogoff, Shu Lea Chang, Martha Wallner, and Tuli Kupferberg; critics presented included Herb Schiller, Jo	On a shoestring budget, half-hour critiques of mainstream media programming were shot and tapes distributed to supporters in carious U.S. cable systems for playback. Copies found their way to several dozen public-access stations in different locales.
1981	Negativland begins broadcasting its audio collage weekly on Over the Edge	KPFA-FM, Berkeley, California	Don Joyce and other group members	Diverse radio practice featuring range of sonic materials and repurposing of found sound, for which the group was sued in 1991, under copyright law.

1974-1982	Advertisements for creation of artificial aurora borealis	Brazilian and U.S. publications	Paulo Bruscky	Ads placed in newspapers to circulate and document a proposed project to create an artificial aurora borealis, using airplanes to color cloud formations.
1982	Radio Polybucket open	Tokyo	Tetsuo Kogawa and others	The earliest mini-FM station in Japan. Evolved into Radio Home Run, which broadcast until 1996, then was reactivated as an Internet radio station, Net.RadioHome Run.
27-28 Sep 1982	Telematic event: "The World in 24 Hours"	Linz (Ars Electronica) and other 15 cities	Robert Adrian X	Electronic networking event in the Upper Austrian regional studio in Linz. Artists in 16 cities on three continents were linked for 24 hours.	W

11-23 Dec 1983	La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairytale	In the exhibition Electra: Electricity and Electronics in the Art of the Twentieth Century, Musee Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris	Roy Ascott and artists participating in 11 cities in Europe, North America, and Australia, Frank Popper, curator	Collaborative storytelling project involving computer conferencing network of artists using ARTEX, an electronic-mail program. Project was active on-line 24 hours a day for 12 days. Several authors in various countries were working on an interactive "planetary fairy-tale". Every day the computer terminal disgorged the contributions of the other characters and it was up to each node to formulate a response that would further thicken the plot and send it out on the E-mail net. Visitors to the exhibition Electra, which was organized at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983, were able to witness the production of a text on screens connected to the authors' computer terminals.	W
1983-1984	Answering machine "site"	Burning Books, San Francisco	Patrick Sumner and others, including Jon Livingston, Michael Peppe, and Sheila Davies	A short, specially commissioned audio work was made available to those who dialed the number provided on a series of 12 postcards distributed to advertise the site; each week, a different work was offered.
1983	Contact	Tel-Aviv	Natan Karczmar	"projet utilisant un réseau de vingt-quatre postes téléphoniques"

1983-1984	Answering machine "site"	Burning Books, San Francisco	Patrick Sumner and others, including Jon Livingston, Michael Peppe, and Sheila Davies	A short, specially commissioned audio work was made available to those who dialed the number provided on a series of 12 postcards distributed to advertise the site; each week, a different work was offered.
1984	Electronic Cafe-84	Five Los Angeles restaurants, Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, Los Angeles. Museum of Contemporary Art	Kit Galloway, Sherrie Rabinowitz	A multimedia, telecollaborative network was created among five family-owned restaurants (in Los Angeles Korean, Hispanic, African and beach communities). Venues were lined using a variety of technologies, including slow-scan, phone link video systems; electronic writing tablets; computers; printers; and video screens. First public use of a storage-and-retrieve pictorial database.
1984	Cyborg	-	Eduardo Kac	Kac's first telepresence project was to involve three different Rio de Janeiro art galleries and the remote control of sculptural objects. Not realized, as a result of technical obstacles.
1984-1985	Hearsay	Toronto	Norman White	Multiple text transmission.