São Paulo & Pittsburgh, January 25th, 1988.
Abstract
Intercities São Paulo/Pittsburgh was an interactive telecommunication event connecting a group of Brazilian art researchers in São Paulo with American colleagues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that happenned on January 25th, 1988.
The IPAT, an institute for research in art and technology from Sao Paulo and the Digital Arts Exchange, the DAX group, from Carnegie Mellon University, worked in close collaboration to find new modalities for informational interchange through slow-scan television.
Intercities was designed to have an experimental and self-reflexive character aimed at exploring new forms for sending, receiving and exchanging information through slow-scan. The concepts of bidirectionality and interactivity would frame the process.
The technical structure and the programming were conceived to promote a balanced interaction between the terminals in São Paulo and in Pittsburgh.
The system could only have been actualized because each crew operated with two slow scan units. Bidirectionality was possible because two telephone lines were operating simultaneously interconnecting the Brazilian and the American terminals. At each location, while one unit was continuously receiving the other was continuously transmitting. Interactivity was also possible because operators at each city were able to modify their messages while observing slowly incoming images.
The exchange demanded a new attitude toward artworks and new creative strategies. Artists were invited to create and have actually presented dialogical visual art works that made actual use of the system’s visual interactivity.
During the event in São Paulo, on January 25th, 1988, the city was celebrating its 434th anniversary under a huge thunderstorm. Nevertheless, an attentive audience at the Museum of Image and Sound, after having crossed the flooded streets, was waiting for transmissions to begin.
After the connection was established, professor Bruce Breland started to deliver his lecture Floating in a Telematic Culture from Pittsburgh. The audience in Sao Paulo could feel his enthusiasm. We could also see his face through the slow-scanned images.
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