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La plissure du texte (Ascott, Roy), 1983Epreuves d’écriture (Lyotard, Jean-François)
 
 
 

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But at the same time artists were working on staging a media activity, without it still being possible to speak of a predefined content. Just as Hans Haacke built an agency's non-predefined news bulletins into an exhibition for «Information,»[47] two thematic Paris exhibitions successfully addressed communicative projects as the crucial opening for art. «Electra,» 1983, showed items like the Teletext project by Roy Ascott and others called «La plissure du texte.» «Les Immatériaux»[48] presented a collective, interlinked writing project called «Épreuves d'écriture» in 1985, but was also an innovative thematic exhibition in both form and content, which went far beyond art contextually. The rhizome-like connecting lines lead from here to Internet art's context systems and on-line platforms[49] and the pure Internet exhibitions, as initiated for the first time by the Walker Art Center in 1998 with «Shock of the View: Museums, Artists, and Audiences in the Digital Age.» In 1999 virtual and real space overlapped in the wide-ranging examination of the Internet in the exhibition «net_condition».

Thus the museum as an institution was confronted with a paradigm of the laboratory, the workshop and the research center that it was able to integrate only

 

temporarily without being able to adopt processual and non-result-oriented works into its organizational structure–even though the «Hybrid Workspace» of documenta X and most recently documenta 11 with its five ‹platforms› postulated this theoretically. Despite the model of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT in Boston or smaller independent producing venues like the Experimental TV Center in Binghamton, New York, founded by Ralph Hocking in 1971, there were still no institutionally planned centers able to promote the dialogue between media, art and industry. In the early 1990s, the economic boom and above all the start of public discussion about the Internet and the media society finally permitted the concrete planning and opening of new institutions like the Ars Electronica Center, Linz (1966), the Intercommunication Center, Tokyo (1996), or the Center for Art and Technology Karlsruhe (1997), which in their different ways met the need for public and artistic access to expensive technology and also for appropriate presentation conditions, and continuing under different conditions the tradition of places like the Bauhaus, Dessau/Weimar, the Black Mountain College, Ashville, NC, or the CAVS at MIT, Boston.

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