This is an excerpt of the very long interview with Kathy Rae Huffman
from nettime. In this part we concentrate on Van Gogh TV. As Mike
Hentz turned out to be the art teacher of Ulf Freyhof (XLR) and an old
friend of Marko Kosnik (also XLR), it might be interesting to have a
look at VGTV. As Kathy Rae Huffman says in the interview: what happened
has not been digested and understood to the fullest by far yet. Could
be that is not always important, but still it is lovely to investigate
the bits and pieces we find. Of course the similarities between some
'net.radio' collaborations and early network art like VGTV are
inspiring to say the least. In some way they are all sort of in the
same 'family' line.


>

JB: You were asked to do the Piazzetta part of Van Gogh TV?

Kathy Rae Huffman:
Yes. In late '91, they invited me to work together to develop different
partners for the Piazza Virtuale. This was pretty much a hard years
work. From the early part of '92 to the long summer of '93 in Kassel
for 100 days of broadcasting. I worked directly with Mike Hentz on this
aspect of the VGTV documenta project.
For me that was a great opportunity, because it meant working on a
longer term project and I was fascinated with their group dynamics,
their ability to bring performance and television and this whole new
network concept of internet and chats and hackers and coding, a world
where I had always felt a bit of an outsider. I was very enthusiastic
to jump in and work on this project which actually happened at the
Documenta 9, in '92, where I spent the whole summer in Kassel.

JB: You said for this you had to travel the eastern block a lot.

Kathy Rae Huffman:
Mike Hentz had a pretty clear idea of what it would take to work in the
different countries, he was no stranger to this kind of organization.
It was very late, it was February and Documenta would start in June.
Our travel to each country, was to give the local groups support and
training, and to meet with officials for possible funding and access.
We travelled in Poland, Russia, Slovenia, Latvia, Finland,
Tjechoslovakia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Austria,
and various places in Germany and Austria.
This was a great development scheme.  Also we had a connection in
Japan, which I made during a trip there in January, right after we
first talked about the project. There wasn't time to initiate many
brand new working relationships, so we had to look at the people we
had worked with before, the groups who could be trusted to do
something under stress, and who could pull it together in their
country.  The commitments had to be put into place very fast.
Often when it's a concentrated effort like this, you naturally rely
on those groups of people who are familiar.  We encouraged each group
to bring in new people to sort of add to the next generation of
experience but there is a level of organisation where you need people
who can do the job. There was a lot at stake here. VGTV had one hundred
days of programming to do - and a unbelievable low budget to do it
with.

The piazetta program actually worked very well. It was very intensive
and exiting part of the whole hundred days of television broadcasting.

JB: Can you tell me which countries it worked best in and in which
countries it was hard and what made the difference?

Kathy Rae Huffman: There were a lot of technical problems always. Even
with Van Gogh TV, who is quite excellent in solving technical problems.
They were a bit in advance of standards being set for ISDN lines and
various ways to connect with pictures and modems and
whatever.  For example the ISDN lines between Paris and Kassel had
extreme problems getting conformed, the software was not available to
modify the different connectivity standards. They were eventually
solved. But they weren't solved by listening to the Post and what
they had to say. They were solved by these guys who sat down and
recoded things. That was a very important thing to observe. There
were rules there, but there were also ways to solve problems around
these rules. They actually did a lot of research and development for
the Deutsche Telekom.

It worked well where there was a group of people who wanted to work
together and who were willing to jump in and have fun, as well as
try some new ideas.
It worked least well when there was some feeling of competition with
the program in Kassel. So, if the artists felt like they were somehow
being used as filler or something like this, that energy was clear.
Sometimes when you're far away, and you don't get the relationship,
these kind of feelings can develop. So,in every case, artists were
invited to come to Kassel. There was money that came from the Soros
foundation, and we were given support from Suzanne Meszoly directly
from the first exchange projects she organized. This money allowed
artists from the east to actually visit Kassel and to provide for
translation. This was a very important support for the piazzetta
project. Switzerland gave money for coordination costs, so that we
could travel and not have to sleep on floors everywhere. We did a lot
of that anyway. It was a very low budget international effort.

JB: So you had no trouble with bureaucracies of governements?

Kathy Rae Huffman: This was the problem of the groups in various
countries to organize. I think the idea was that we represented the
international program. We tried to answer all the questions to make it
clear what they needed to do. We provided them with Picture
Phones, which allowed the program to take place without using
television transmission - it was early live video transmitted by phone
lines, on TV.
In the various places we visited, Mike held workshops. We kept copious
notes of who all the different people involved were, how to contact
them, how to inform them with all the facts and ongoing operation.

Remember, this was stil a time when you still had to phone the
international operator and make an appointment to send a fax to Russia.
It's not like today, where you can just send an email and ok, they
might have some problems getting a dialup phone connection from time
to time, but then, there were very severe communication difficulties.
You would make an appointment and then sit at the telephone the whole
day and wait for the operator to call you. And, if for some reason you
were in the toilet, you missed your connection possiblity for the day.
That is a very difficult pressure to be under, especially when the
program schedule is dense.

JB: There hasn't been much visibility or publications about
Van Gogh TV's Kassel project in Holland for example, do you know why?

Kathy Rae Huffman:  I don't think there has been a lot of research
into the VGTV projects in general. Of course, they won the Deutscher
Mediakunstprize in 1993, which was awarded at the ZKM. As far as I
know, there were lectures and presentations at The Next Five Minutes,
too.  Maybe after 100 days, not everybody wants to keep hearing about
it. Also, perhaps because of the technical programming aspects of
their work, and the hybrid nature of their interface to the public,
it is not the cool technology that media theoreticians are interested
in.
Meanwhile, in Holland, there was Rabotnik TV, where Menno Grootveld
and Maarten Ploeg made a lot of actions. The VPRO had a lot of live
interesting program events that happened very early.  Most of the
people with any history in interactive experimental TV works were
invited to participate in the Piazza Virtuale events in Kassel,
and they often came to the social gatherings.

I think that VGTV had to be very strong and clear to keep their
position, because everybody wanted to have some credit for the
project. They worked very hard on this project, and made an extreme
energy output. In fact, shortly after Documenta the group, which had
worked together for 5 years, began to break apart. It was such extreme
energy that went into the development of this major, long term project.
Piazza Virtuale was created with very little money and had very little
support from the Documenta. This was a labor of love.  Maybe it looks
like it was a high priced thing, but it wasn't.

What always impressed me is that they also wanted to make it fun,
constantly, for the people who visited.
There were fanclubs that self-organized. They would come to Kassel in
groups!  And, the satellite user groups, who were connected via bbs and
electronic mail, who would connect with each other at Piazza Virtuale.
They would come and have their meetings in the Piazza.  It was amazing,
the kinds of new audiences this project developed.

JB: What happened with these new audiences, because after this it seems
that a long silence set in.

Kathy Rae Huffman: It's funny how these things work. You never know
immediately who was this audience, especially if it was a television
audience.  In television, when the program is over, it is over -- it
is yesterday's newspaper.
It was always a big problem for us working in the eighties to know who
was the audience, what effect did any of this artwork on television
have. Nobody really knew immediately. It's quite fascinating to me
that I am meeting people now, in very strange places, like in Glasgow,
or in Spain, people who watched Piazza Virtuale when they were
teenagers, and it changed their life.

So it does make a difference, it really does. These people are now very
active and organizing around issues on the topic. They have no direct
contact with this VGTV, but they knew them.  In some conversations,
when I mentioned what my part was, they say:" Owhaaaaaaoooww, I remember
watching that and jumping up and down and thinking this is great!
Calling everybody I knew and telling them about it.."
Nobody knows these things in the art world, but it must have been going
on in various places around the whole European scene.

JB: Was there much reflection afterwards, reports or talks?

Kathy Rae Huffman:
Well yes. They have made dozens of lectures and follow up reports.
A documentary was made. There exists a website with a lot of
information. Theoretically I think all this area of live TV by
artists is still quite open for analyses. Very open.
The fact that they were bridging a gap between the program and
audience, a direct television connection, actually a live two-way
television, nobody knows how to handle this really, even though
there have been experiments going on since the late 1960s.
Now that we have web-tv, that we have the whole multi-user online
environment, (which by the way the Van Gogh TV energy has morphed
into very nicely), it might be easier to take the early experiences
and relate back. It is a special topic. I like to look back over from
the early examples, the sixties, seventies and eighties all have
instances when live TV interventions were taking place.  It has
gradually started to build into a topic that is open for analysis.

JB: Can you maybe lift one piece of the curtain and tell us what your
conclusion could be or what from your point of view is the most
interesting about it?

Kathy Rae Huffman:
First of all, it is the kind of event that makes much more impact
if you can experience it first hand, yourself. Watching a documentary
is a bit voyeuristic and it doesn't translate well. It is really
something where the more people who can be involved in a first hand
way, the better. The problem often is that there aren't enough ways
to establish nodes for public contact. VGTV set up Public Entry Points
in Kassel, they set up points in different countries, they lent the
Picture Phones, and set-up modems, but it was a bit early for the
general audience to get involved in it.  Therefore, the main players
were technically orientated, often hackers and programmers.  As the
summer went along, and the sections of the program became technically
more reliable, consistant, and comfortable for everyone, then poets,
performance artists, and live actions were easier for VGTV to
incorporate.

Now what has happened is that they have the experience from this
situation, as well as other programs that they made.  Other groups
have done live TV, but noone has the major experience of combining
Network communication with graphic interfaces, and for such a long
period of time. Now, they can take that experience into the webworld
of multi-user environments with knowledge.
They are aware, and do not treat the Internet like it was something
brand new. They go into it with some authority of experience.
I think we have to accept that as a very serious attempt to go on and
continue to build. This work is important to follow through with.



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