New Community Networks
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Wired for Change
Artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz experimented for years with "virtual spaces," using telecommunications technology (including their 1980 Hole In Space project and their collaborations with NASA using communications satellites). In 1984 they launched a "third place," the Electronic Cafe International, based on their successful cultural and technological project, the Electronic Cafe, that incorporated the diverse cultures of Los Angeles, California in a unique experiment. Now from their Santa Monica, California nerve center, the Electronic Cafe International hosts a multitude of live multimedia cultural events with participants at sites all over the world. Cafe visitors encounter, in roughly equal measures, high-tech communications and computing paraphernalia of all stripes, chairs, tables, and other cafe-like accoutrements, and a diverse collection of decidedly low-tech and funky knick-knacks. Using a wide range of available and state-of-the-art technology including audio links, slow-scan television over voice-grade telephone lines, real-time video conferencing, and collaborative Internet technology (among many others), Galloway and Rabinowitz have hosted a wide variety of real-time encounters that they see as a way to explore and develop alternatives to corporate mass culture.
The original 1984 Electronic Cafe project linked five diverse locations in the Los Angeles area, including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art with family-owned restaurants in Korean (8th Street Restaurant), Hispanic (Anna Maria's), African American (The Gumbo House), and "artsy" beach communities (Gunter's) together into one shared virtual space. Within this space participants "could send each other slow-scan images, draw or write together with an electronic writing tablet, print pictures with the video printer, enter and retrieve information (including graphics) and ideas in the computer database, and store or retrieve images on a videodisk recorder that held 20,000 images" (Galloway and Rabinowitz, 1992). This cultural exploration was widely enjoyed by community residents at the same time that it was a pioneer groupware application.
Spread out over hundreds of square miles, home to over 80 languages, lacerated by freeways, and, in 1992, the scene of a devastating "multiethnic eruption" (Navarro, 1993), Los Angeles (being more of a "chunky stew" than a "melting pot" according to Galloway) served both as a global model and as an intercity urban model for the original Electronic Cafe project. Galloway and Rabinowitz consciously chose centers of various ethnic communities within Los Angeles for the project (10 sites had originally been planned but budget restraints forced them to scale back) and worked with community members for six months before the project was launched. They deliberately avoided selecting an establishment-approved cultural icon for the position of artist-in-residence, selecting instead strongly indigenous voices that more closely represented the community. It would be impossible to describe the 7-week project exhaustively. "There are hundreds of stories," according to Rabinowitz, "and over 9,000 images were generated and saved on disk." The most interesting aspect of the project might have been how the behavior of the participants changed over time. Initially participants at the various sites engaged in "community definition" by broadcasting images that offset their stereotypes to the other sites and by having community poets and artists come forward and read their poetry or display their art on-line. After this period subsided, a less formal period began, where people at different sites worked in collaborative 1-to-1 experiments that were increasingly well-executed (as they mastered the technology) and experimental.
Based on their Electronic Cafe experience, Galloway and Rabinowitz declared that they had "reached the limits of models" and they began setting up a more permanent institution that could support itself and grow. This institution, dubbed the Electronic Cafe International was based on the idea of a cafe as an informal, community-gathering area "that exists in all communities and in all cultures." As of this writing other cafes have been established in New York City, Tokyo, Vancouver, Toronto, Dublin, Jerusalem, Paris, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Austin, Woodstock, Managua, Seoul, and many other locations, including several at sea.
While most of the systems discussed in this book are asynchronous and text-based, Galloway's and Rabinowitz's focus on real-time audio and video connections is complementary in many ways. The Electronic Cafe InternationalUs explorations into multimedia, cultural diversity, international communications, and aesthetics serve as important reminders of creative opportunities that transcend conventional text and discussion-based approaches. Galloway and Rabinowitz have been collaborating for 20 years and they now speak of their cultural explorations with "recombinant telecommunications" in which both low-end and high-end technology is employed in different ways depending on the resources, skills, interests, and wishes of the participants. Galloway's and Rabinowitz's focus on community, both local and global; their involving people in poor neighborhoods, less developed countries, disabled people, and children among others; and their commitment to experimentation with new models and encounters, all serve as important social experiments that can help people understand developing technologies while developing a consciousness for community-oriented modes of communication. Since cafes exist in all cultures as community meeting points the recent upsurge in cyber-cafes around the world reaffirms their vision of an Electronic Cafe.
I hope that this information is useful to you. Please feel free to send me (Doug Schuler) your questions, comments, and corrections. I will try to keep the information in these pages current.