In 1983 artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz began refining a concept for a telecollaborative network connecting informal public multimedia communications venues. The original Electronic Cafe Network was to be the artists offering as a replicable social model and proposed antidote to the approaching Orwellian year of 1984. It was thought that by integrating multiple-media telecollaborative technologies with the culturally diverse creative communities throughout Los Angeles that a powerful new context for cultural
sharing would emerge -- a breakaway context that would establish an important dialogue about the role such technologies can play in fostering the invention of a new cultural interaction, and scale of artistic collaboration and inquiry. Thus the world would be safe from the Orwellian prophecy :-)
The Electronic Cafe Network was about integration: Integrating community, art, technology, multimedia telecommunications, and cross-cultural communications. The technical mission was to define the basic human requirements to facilitate a "creative conversation" between people even if they did not speak the same language. The technical installation used a hybrid of computer-based communications:
1) A text-based computer network with a state-of-the-art user interface allowing people to participate in, or to create their own topics of discussion;
2) A keyword searchable text and pictorial databases "Community Memory(s)"; 3) The first demonstration of a public storage and retrievable image database as a component of the keyword searchable database;
4)Videoconferencing;
5)Audioconferencing;
6)Realtime collaborative telewriting & shared-screen drawing, including the ability to collaboratively add annotations to still-video images;
7) The ability of any venue to broadcast sight and sound to any, or all, of the others venues;
8) High resolution image printers so that activities could be documented and mounted on the wall for public view.
The original Electronic Cafe Network was operational for seven weeks during the 1984 Summer Olympic Arts Festival.
The cultural diversity of greater Los Angeles provided a perfect setting for mimicking an international network. Artists and educators that lived in the communities helped find the host venues for their EC installations. They were trained as EC systems operators and everyone drew upon their talents as community instigators, helping themselves and others in the community to culturally, and politically animate "their" network node. To meet the challenge of establishing a representative cultural identity on the network, and then, to eventually discover the new skills, dexterity's, and common concerns and interests required to successfully begin telecollaborating with other communities on the EC network. The original Electronic Cafe Network was a model for a regional resource and intended to demonstrate in a very public way the rewards of acknowledging, cultivating, and acculturating multimedia, telecollaborative, virtual space. The six months prior to the installation of any technology in the participating communities were dedicated to community meetings, introductions to what was then state-of-the-art and prototype technology, and the training of the artists and others living in the communities that would be the facilitators in their own communities. Budget issues reduced the intended ten EC-Sites to the final five locations.
The Original Electronic Cafe Network 1984 included:
The Gumbo House, Crenshaw, CA., (South Central LA)
Ana Maria Restaurant, (East LA)
The 8th Street Restaurant, (Korea Town) LA.
Gunter's Cafe, (beach area) Venice, CA.
The Museum Of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Downtown LA.
Text by Rabinowitz/Galloway