1980: ARTEX – ARTIST’S ELECTRONIC EXCHANGE NETWORK
As part of the project “The World in 24 Hours”, enormous technological efforts were invested into simultaneously connecting artists at the Ars Electronica venue in Linz with 15 cities worldwide.¹ Only the latest telecommunication systems were used, such as fax, slow-scan TV (a forerunner of the videophone) and, most importantly, the Artist’s Electronic Exchange Network (ARTEX) initiated by artists Robert Adrian X and Bill Bartlett in 1980. For most festival visitors, such technological connections appeared like science fiction. The relevance of ARTEX today can only be understood if one realizes that at that time, data exchange via the Internet was reserved solely for military and a handful of university institutions. The opening of the Internet to private users was not even foreseeable. As the first computer mailbox program for artists, ARTEX was a true pioneering achievement in its intention to let creatives participate in this new telecommunicative space of possibilities, even if only a small group of media-savvy artists who had access to computer networks through universities and media collectives were affected by it.

1983: FIRST COOPERATIVE WRITING PROJECT ON THE NET
Following Marshall McLuhan’s dictum “The Medium is the Message,” the very creation of a network for artists contained the message that all participants were to be recognized as equal agents and all individual expressions were to be seen as part of a collective composition. In 1983, Roy Ascott called for the first net-based cooperative writing project via ARTEX. In it, participants wrote a collage-like fairy tale over a period of three weeks and published it under the title “La Plissure du Texte” (“The Folding of the Text”).² Ascott saw the benefit of such undertakings in the internationality and diversity of the actors:  “The creative use of networks makes them organisms. The work is never in a state of completion, how could it be so? Telematique is a decentralising medium; its metaphor is that of a web or net in which there is no centre, or hierarchy, no top nor bottom.”³

1984: ELECTRONIC CAFÉ NETWORK
For artists in the 1980s, network technologies were the key to the so-called “electronic space” in which alternative forms of communication and interactivity could be realized – without having to take geographical distances and institutional norms into account. The “Electronic Café Network” by the artist duo Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, realized in Los Angeles in 1984, was one such pilot project.⁴ Four fast-food restaurants were extensively equipped with image, sound and video transmission devices and, together with another multimedia station in the Museum of Contemporary Art, formed an urban intranet. The electronic space now had the task of bridging the social distance between its visitors, instead of the local distance. The idea of networking was extended to the audience and was intended to foster the understanding between cultural milieus within the urban area by facilitating intranet encounters between people who would not have been willing to do so in an urban environment. Cafés have always been nuclei of networking for artists as that is where they spent time cultivating intellectual exchange with like-minded people and engaging in chance encounters. Even for the writer Stefan Zweig, the coffeehouse was “a sort of democratic club, open to everyone for the price of a cheap cup of coffee, where every guest can sit for hours with this little offering, to talk, write, play cards, receive post, and above all consume an unlimited number of newspapers and journals.”⁵ Decades later and in a new technological era, the commercial Internet cafés of the 2000s offered their guests similar services with “Internet surfing”.

1990S: ELECTRONIC CAFÉ INTERNATIONAL
The artistic concept of the “Electronic Café International” (ECI) was spread internationally by Galloway and Rabinowitz’ from 1989 onwards and was based on the combination of coffee service with brand new telecommunication technologies. Teams of artists built such temporary ECI laboratories to connect with like-minded people across countries and continents, to find common ground, and to initiate collective action. To be in different places and yet be able to simultaneously collaborate on concerts, sound, dance, writing, drawing, video, and computer projects was the allure of the newly discovered virtual space. These initiatives required a large array of expensive hardware and software and were initially tied to fixed stations. Around 1992, a group of artists from Cologne, together with the agency 235 Media, designed a mobile pavilion in which the ECI began its work at documenta 9 in Kassel (see illustration), and in 1993, also at the Venice Biennale and in Cologne’s Mediapark.⁶ Networking in itself became an artistic value, giving birth to such concepts as network art and telecommunications art. In terms of technology, the projects that were ambitious at the time have long since became outdated; what remains significant about them, however, is that they addressed the need for international networking among artists and recognized the impact of technical networks for artistic practice. Today, we need neither “electronic cafés” nor Internet cafés; the cell phone is all that is needed to access online communities. Networking is a matter of course for everyone. The generation of artists of the digital natives is now making the mechanisms of virtual areas such as Instagram, YouTube, etc. their own in order to disseminate their art and, not least, to set critical accents there.