From form to platform

As well as articulating individual artistic positions, many artists are concerned at the same time about ‹public access›, in other words about universal access to the cultural history of images, about their share in manufacturing this history. While Nam June Paik dreams of a video archive of the avant-garde and a center for experimental arts,[43] Stan VanDerBeek talks about the «image library, newsreel of dreams, culture intercom» in his 1965 Manifesto.[44] In his vision, such centers develop «a material basis for dialogue with other centers at a picture speed of 186,000 miles per second»–an early vision of telematic installation and also of the WWW. Remarkably enough, the exhibition «Information» at MoMA New York presented the first information architecture as part of an exhibition as early as 1970. Thus the exhibition as a device reflects its own virtualization as part of a publicly accessible archive at a very early stage.[45] There are a number of artists who do not see themselves as media artists but have paid attention to specific media aspects and contexts. In «Information» these included Hans Haacke, but also see the later work of Vito Acconci, «Virtual Intelligence Mask» (1993); «UTV» (1994) by

Heimo Zobernig and others; Pierre Huyghe «Mobile TV»; or Tobias Rehberger's «Lying around lazy. Not even moving for TV, Sweets, Coke, and Vaseline» (1996­1999), all of whom are interested in designing the electronic environment.[46] All the 1990s club culture video lounges transpose the concept of the open platform and link it with the idea of a ‹video-on-demand› system that was realized at media art festivals even in the early 1990s as a festival option, but then became a dominant theme because of the rise of the Internet. But the man who actually paved the way for this information architecture was Dan Graham, whose installations had already formulated his specific interest in architectural questions. His use of half-silvered glass then led him in 1986 to construct the first of a series of spaces for video display, «Interior Design for Space Showing Videos,» which as the title suggests could be seen as exhibition architecture, if they had not at the same time also reflected the media quality of our public and private spaces and to that extent also demonstrated an artistic concept. Graham has continued to explore the full range of this concept of transparent and open space until today in a series of works designed for public space.