“When I started to participate in artistic telecommunications projects by the end of the 1970s, I was interested in an art, that doesn’t involve things and objects, but connections, and involves a kind of collapsing of time and space. The café house mentality was, what we were after: At that time, you didn´t have a community, it was hard to find anybody to talk to in places like Bristol, or Pittsburgh, or Vancouver, or Vienna. You found your communication online. That was the illusion, and it gave us the inspiration to go on with communicative art projects.”The Vienna-based artist Robert Adrian has been active in many art forms: Painting, photography, sculpture, film and – last, but not least – telecommunications art. Especially in the latter he is considered as one of the pioneers, exploring the artistic possibilities of the expanding telecommunication technologies since the late 1970s as well as early computer networks like Bulletin Board System, Fido-Net, Internet, and radio. Adrian is especially interested in process-oriented, communicative and collaborative possibilities of the two-way-communication structures and devices his projects are making use of.

Sabine Breitsameter:

Robert Adrian, in 1979 you participated for the first time in a telecommunications project. Its title was “Interplay” and it was organized by the Canadian Bill Bartlett. What was your motivation to take part? What fascinated you?

Robert Adrian:

Well, the thrill that I got out of it, was being connected, and that you’re present in other places. So, I wanted to think about a form, that didn´t involve things and objects, but connections, and that involved a kind of singularity, a kind of collapsing of time and space. That was very important for me, that notion about being connected and finding a community . The café house mentality was, what we were after. You didn´t have a community, you couldn´t go down to 10th Street in New York and hang out with your artist friends, because it was hard to find anybody to talk to in places like Bristol in England, or Pittsburgh, or Vancouver, or Vienna. You found your communication online. That was the fantasy, that was the illusion, that was the kind of ambience of the project and the inspiration to go on.

Sabine Breitsameter:

Since then, you had been doing almost every year a project, with telecommunication devices and artistic connectivity, especially in the early 80s. How did you overcome the immense technological challenges in these projects? How did you handle them?

Robert Adrian:

It should be clear, that I have actually never done a communication work myself, because I always organized projects. So there is a kind of curatorial aspect to the kind of work I do, a managerial or curatorial. This is a problem about identifying art works in this new media altogether, because there isn´t really an author, there is always a collective authorship somehow.

And there are people involved who are technicians, and without the technicians you cannot do anything, they are very central to the project. They have to find people who can get inside the machines and make them do what they are supposed to do, because the manufacturers and the regulators attempt to control the machines, so they can´t be communicative. You need collaborative engineers and technicians who become automatically artists in that sense.

Sabine Breitsameter:

At which point did you enter this movement of telecommunications art? Can we consider you as a pioneer?

Robert Adrian:

I think, there are three or four generations. The first generation happened before I got there. That were the people in the 70s, who were soldering up their own equipment, basically like the original ham radio http://www.irony.com/ham-howto.html operators, the amateur radio people. They are people you encounter still. I´ve done work with them. They are gung-ho types. They say: “If you don´t build your own radio, don´t talk to me about radio. If you can´t build a radio, what do you got to say about radio?” They are still there, with their soldering irons, buying the electronic parts. – Modem technology, packet switching, all of these things come out of radio freaks. It´s an absolutely astonishing reservoire of brilliant excentric amateurs. They were a kind of a guerilla group. Of course the people around the whole high tech thing with Nam June Pike and Douglas Davidson had access to satellite transmission. The moment I came in, was when the stuff was there on a shelf. You could go to a store or you could go to a company and you could say: Could you lend me a fax machine? Also IP Sharp contributed their time sharing system for art projects for example. So at that moment I came in that 2nd generation. The 3rd generation comes along with the Bulletin Board Systems…

Sabine Breitsameter:

… which was known as “Mailbox” in Germany and became quite popular around the mid-80s, when the Personal Computer had come on the market. You had been organising a number of projects with it http://www.t0.or.at/~radrian/BIO/index.html. What were the creative challenges of this system?

Robert Adrian:

It was a mailbox, basically. But it wasn´t depending on a central computer, like the IP Sharp network, we had been using in a number of art projects. With the Bulletin Board System, it could take a week for a message to get through to somewhere. The difficulty with the Bulletin Board System was, that it didn´t get over the Atlantic, it didn´t get over the Pacific, you couldn´t go to Eastern Europe, only with great difficulties, because the distances were too great. To get to Japan was really complicated, and telephone costs were too high. And then, there were all kinds of tricks, and once again the hackers came in there and found ways to hack into companies to steal telephone time, so you could get over the Atlantic in certain times, so if you knew the protocols, you could get your stuff collected in Amsterdam and you would be flashed over and sent across and then get to North America. You could do that. But finally, the Internet was the international thing. So the 4th generation is Internet. It becomes accessible around 1990.

Sabine Breitsameter:

When the Internet became popular in Europe, that was in the mid-90s, it gave a big push to the artists’ community. Looking at it now, a decade later, what do you think: Could the Internet keep its artistic promises?

Robert Adrian:

Well, the excitement and enthusiasm has died off, and it has become a kind of gaming technology, a commercial and gaming technology . The creative use of the Web, one of the interesting things for me, was always the self–publishing side. It meant that you could publish whatever you wanted. You don´t have to print it. You don´t have to carry it around with you, you don´t have to go anywhere, you can just put it online, and that to me is very interesting, that´s a kind of place where I would have hoped it went. – I should say, that up until five years ago, I felt, that I knew more or less, where things were and where they were going. But I don’t think, that I could have predicted the situation we are in now.

Sabine Breitsameter:

From your artistic point of view: What’s the situation now? What is its aesthetic-communicative status?

Robert Adrian:

It´s the mobile telephone with the image transfer system, so it´s all the technology which we were dreaming of or fantasizing about in around 1980. It has actually come now. There is now the picture phone in Japan, and there are about ten million of them in circulation, by which people are able to send images to each other while they are talking.

So they can snap the environment, they can actually show their faces. And it´s radio, it´s not telephone – it´s wireless! Radio has recovered its communication role. For years it has been a centralized broadcasting medium: a one-to-many-medium; it has been a commodified product in the US for commercial reasons, in Europe for information and control reasons, but in any case, it has been centralized, licensed and restricted. With the advent of the handy telephone, you are back to the original. You are back to two-way communication.

Sabine Breitsameter:

Thank you very much for the interview, Bob.

Biography

Robert Adrian, *1935 in Toronto/Canada, lives since 1972 in Vienna. Began working with telecommunication technology in 1979 and organised a number of projects involving fax, slow-scan tv, amateur radio, Bulletin Board Systems etc. during the 80s and 90s. He has been working with different media, including installation, model-making, photography, painting, sculpture, radio and computer. His work has been included in many international exhibitions, for example at the Biennale in Venice (1980 und 1984), the Biennale in Sidney (1986) and and several times at the Ars Electronica in Linz/Österreich.