of the space. The way you shape a space determines what can happen to the information in it.»[35] More than twenty years later, this statement has lost nothing of its currentness. On the contrary: The more people shift activities to the realm of data (for instance, to the Internet), the more important an awareness of the empowering or, as applicable, obstructing attributes of the code on which these virtual realms are based becomes.[36]

In 1977 (the year of the documenta 6), Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz produced the «Satellite Arts Project» in which two groups of dancers interacted at two different locations. The images were put together on screen in such a way that people three thousand kilometers apart looked like they were dancing together. Galloway and Rabinowitz' satellite project «Hole in Space» followed in 1980. Based on a more open–and participatory–concept than «Satellite Arts Project,» it would point the way for a number of later projects. In the «Electronic Café» devised for the 1984

Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Galloway and Rabinowitz produced a prototype for the Internet cafes that would flourish a decade later. Running for seven weeks, their cafe was a multimedia computer and video network that connected in real time five Los Angeles districts populated by different ethnic groups. The aim was to enable communication,[37] and the clearly socially oriented network prototype of the «Electronic Café» has remained highly current: «Every user has unrestricted access to the databasess Š and whenever they feel like it can send messages, create files, read other bulletins and submit comments and suggestions over public terminals in libraries, food stores, cafés and community centers. Š An instrument for collective thinking, planning, organizing, deciding.»[38] In that sense, the «Electronic Café» was a direct forerunner of the Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) founded in 1986, as well as of 1990s context-based systems like The Thing (New York and other locations), De Digitale Stad (Amsterdam) and International City Federation (Berlin).