Works covers a period from the 1980’s and early ’90’s when Don Foresta and Georges-Albert Kisfaludi collaborated on building artists’ networks and brought students from several schools, as well as independent artists, to work together online exchanging and creating images.
The period starts with the first network exchange Foresta was involved in, “Interface”, a slowscan image exchange between the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and the American Center in Paris. The Venice Biennale in 1986 when Foresta, along with Roy Ascott and Tom Sherman, was a commissioner to the 42nd Biennale, was an important step in moving from analog to digital technology. Foresta was responsible for building a computer network with artists using Macintosh computers linked by modems.
The various experiments were under the titles of the Electronic Café founded by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, the International Media Exchange, Laboratoire du Langage Electronique, or Artistes en Réseau, the French-based laboratory experimenting with image exchange. Foresta and Kisfaludi created an Electronic Café in Paris and helped set up others in Denmark and Germany. The IME was the vehicle for much of our exchange activity, the LLE, an attempt to create a laboratory for network art in 1987 which eventually evolved into a shared lab with the CNAM in Paris, an art and science masters which ran for about four years. Artistes en Réseau was the first format attempt in the mid-80’s to create an artists’ network.
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