4. Two sites

4. Two sites

In 1982 the project Hole in the Sky was launched in Los Angeles and New York. The project used satellite technology to make a criss-cross broadcast. A monitor was placed in a window in the streets of L.A and New York. On top of the monitor was a camera and a microphone. The images and the voices of people stopping at the windows and one of the sites was broadcast to the other place and vice versa. There were no signs telling anybody about the project, but people soon found out how it functioned. A huge amount of people got interested in making the real-time contact with the people on the other site. Tele communication couldn’t be more visible.

When Internet came it brought a new dimension to communication and the world became real-time connect globally. Many artists have used Internet for this reason also using real-time streaming of moving images. F ex has Paul Sermon in a number of installations, like Telematic Visions of 1993, combined a person at one site with another person somewhere but projected or screened next to the first person.

NonTVTVstation used public Internet networks but broadcast with a quality almost comparable to television. To make a broadcast in two direction we needed quiet a large amount of bandwidth, which we could very seldom get hold of. In a few projects we managed, but we had a number of more ideas and proposals for projects that we had to say no to because they would be too hard to produce technically.