ELECTRA,
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART OF THE CITY OF PARIS
10 DECEMBER 1983 – 5 FEBRUARY 1984
In
this early example of “instant messaging” art, the artist
provides the infrastructure for an independent telecommunications
network inspired by the “wildcat” networks that temporarily
flourished in 1982 by exploiting cracks in the national network
that allowed people to make free telephone calls to one another
by dialing certain unassigned numbers normally kept secret. Newspaper
ads invite members of the public to make calls to the telecommunications
installation, where they can talk to, and leave messages for, total
strangers visiting the museum. Unlike like messages exchanged on
the real-life wildcat networks, those exchanged through “The
Communicative Space” are not clandestine: all calls are instantly
broadcast over the museum’s public address system; a special
interface is creating to broadcast a portion of the calls during
the course of a program on a nationwide radio channel.