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28
MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION / EXPERIMENT
THE
COMMUNICATIVE SPACE
ELECTRA,
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART OF THE CITY OF PARIS
10 DECEMBER 1983 – 5 FEBRUARY 1984
In
this early example of “instant messaging” art,
the artist provides the infrastructure for an independent
telecommunications network inspired by the “wildcat”
networks that temporarily flourished in 1982 by exploiting
cracks in the national network that allowed people to make
free telephone calls to one another by dialing certain unassigned
numbers normally kept secret. Newspaper ads invite members
of the public to make calls to the telecommunications installation,
where they can talk to, and leave messages for, total strangers
visiting the museum. Unlike like messages exchanged on the
real-life wildcat networks, those exchanged through “The
Communicative Space” are not clandestine: all calls
are instantly broadcast over the museum’s public address
system; a special interface is creating to broadcast a portion
of the calls during the course of a program on a nationwide
radio channel.
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