ART + COM - An Interdisciplinary Media Laboratory in West Berlin (1987 - 1993 - the time when the artists Fleischmann and Strauss were a part of it)
How did it all start? In the mid-1980s, few people thought that everyone would have a computer in their home. It was a rather futuristic goal to explore the computer as a tool and medium for communication. But in West Berlin, there was already a nucleus of digital media. Edouard Bannwart, a professor of urban studies, was leading a research project on data communication between the art academies in Berlin, Braunschweig, and Kassel.
In Berlin, he gradually brought in other digital and analog experts. Some, like Fleischmann and Strauss, came from the University of the Arts, others from Mental Images, a Berlin-based software company, from the Technical University, and some from the Chaos Computer Club. Discussions went on all night until a common language was found to link the disciplines. One year later, in 1988, they founded ART + COM as an institute for the design and development of digital media in the form of a registered association. Berkom, the research department of Deutsche Telekom, generously supported them. The IT industry provided them with free hardware. They wrote their first research proposals.
In the context of the long-term research projects New Media in Urban Planning and The Digital Model House, remarkable scenarios were conceived. The interactive city simulation Berlin-Cyber City (1989) took visitors into the past and future of Berlin after the fall of the Wall. This was followed by one of the world's first artistic VR installations, Home of the Brain (1989), which took visitors inside the virtual New National Gallery. Both works illustrate the idea of a continuous virtual landscape of information that strives for a seamless transition from large to small, as in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland or Charles & Ray Eames' Power of Ten. You can move from a bird's-eye view of the city into Mies van der Rohe's New National Gallery, into the virtual exhibition about four thinkers, into their houses of thought.
This is where the idea of a consistent world information structure emerges, as it was realized a short time later in the ART + COM project TerraVision (1993) using satellite data and finally introduced as a mass product in Google Earth (2007) and Google Earth Timelapse (2021). The legal dispute between ART + COM and Google on this topic became public through the Netflix movie The Billion Dollar Code.
TerraVision (1993-94) by Axel Schmidt, Gerd Grüneis, Pavel Mayer, Joachim Sauter and many others at ART + COM based on the work of Bannwart, Fleischmann and Strauss, who pioneered this work with their first research projects (Digital Urban Planning, Berlin Cyber City, etc.). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBMJVgi8vm8
Europe Tour Google Earth (2007), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAtu3aGpNs8,
Our Cities | Timelapse in Google Earth (2021)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v74_mf2usc06 CRE222 Terravision 2021.