Notes on Telecommunications Art: Shifting Paradigms

The author describes two telecommunications art collaborations as representative of a paradigm shift in the genre from video installation to participatory, interactive network. The first work, Correspondent in Babel, was created as a performance installation for a gallery setting with traditional artist-audience relationships intact. The second, a series of slow-scan video transmissions between Boston, Massachusetts, and Managua, Nicaragua, brought together artists and non-artists in an exploratory relationship. Contemporary telecommunications art, the author maintains, is characterized in terms more analogous to the second work than to the first, in that participants’ roles are expanded to include or to merge artist and audience.