Art-Com

ART-COM - 1982
telecommunication project by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz

There was a couple of other projects, one called "Art Com", which was sort of like spending lots of hours in composite image spaces, sort of "living" there... We actually clocked so much time, it wasn't like just an exhibition or an installation, we worked with a university, and students spent five hours at a time, relating to each other and interacting in composite image spaces. (Kit Galloway, video conference, Waag Society, Amsterdam, 2003)



Sherrie: it's a real thing to be said — how do you create a place as an image? That really changed our mental perceptions, and actions, when we were teaching this kind of thing later on at University we had youg students saying "Well, why don't they do this all along"? And there was a student who was afraid to be touched, she had some kind of phobia. And through her image being touched virtually, she became a real hooker...
Kit: Healed!
Sherrie: ...and said: "Why don't they have this in all hospitals?" It's very interesting to see how our brain translates our physical body to any image, it's still to be discovered, wether it's in avatars, in artificial reality, it's really much a real switch. (video conference, Waag Society, Amsterdam, 2003)

ART-COM was a credited multi-disciplinary laboratory at Loyola Marymount University in which graduate students used performance as the mode of investigation to study and comment on their experiences of "living in" a composite-image space. Students also explored performing everyday tasks, collaborative problem solving, and theatre skits mimicking life situations with their fellow students who were at a remote site on campus. This "life in virtual space" lab extended the notion of "the image as place," and as a "virtual performance space" developed in the Satellite Arts Project.

A final live public performances of the findings of the ART-COM lab were performed at Loyola Marymount University, and for an audiences at the American Film Institute (AFI), Los Angeles.

Created and produced by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz; supported with equipment donations from Sony Corporation and the facilities of Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.

Source: http://www.ecafe.com/museum/history/ksoverview2.html

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