a partner of the Getty Center's "Faces of LA" project.
Nineteen of Los Angeles' most respected and innovative institutions have
collaborated under the leadership of the Getty Information Institute to
present to the world a picture of Los Angeles as represented in their
combined collections. Utilizing digital tools,these institutions will
deliver, via the Internet, the extraordinary range of visual culture and
documentation materials available in Los Angeles. By combining their
resources and selected portions of their collections, the institutions
represented in Faces of LA have created an entity larger than any
individual collection. Through unprecedented access of
cultural, documentary, and visual material, Faces of LA will provide a new
view of Los Angeles to the world.
Faces of LA brings together nearly 2 million records, many of them never seen before by the public or researchers. Through a specially designed interface, users will be able to view portions of collections as diverse as the Electronic Cafe International and the Autry Museum in the context of one another. The Faces partners believe that the combined database created by this process will reveal the unique nature of Los Angeles culture to the world. In addition, Faces will serve as a model to other communities who are seeking to present their cultural resources.
The Partners:
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library American Film Institute Autry Museum of Western Heritage CSU, Northridge, Sepcial Collection and Archives Cirrus County of Los Angeles Public Library Electronic Cafe International The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS The Getty Los Angeles Public Library Museum of Television & Radio Museum of Tolerance, Simon Wiesenthal Center Otis College of Art and Design/The Woman's Building Southwest Museum UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History UCR/California Museum of Photography USC, Helen Topping Architecture and Fine Arts Library USC, Special Collections Visual Communications.
The Electronic Cafe
International has
contributed approximately 200 images to the Getty's "Faces of LA" project
that document activities related to Rabinowitz and Galloway's original
Electronic Cafe project, which was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) for the 1984 Los
Angeles Olympic Arts Festival.
Selections feature scenes from participating sites in five different ethnic neighborhoods (East L.A., South Central, Koreatown, and Venice) and MOCA that were linked together for seven weeks using a variety of telecollaborative technologies that facilitated tele-collaborative performances and at making, and the sharing of cultural and community resource over a multiple-media network.
This highly original and visionary tele-arts project demonstrated the importance, and enabling implications of networked multimedia environments for the arts and the establishment of virtual communities and forecast by ten years what we have now come to know as the World Wide Web.
Creative works and documentation that
are represented include telecollaborative
drawings,
annotated video images, computer-based
communications, and video portraits created by local
artists, international visitors, and participants from
the culturally diverse neighborhoods involved.
Many of the visual creations and telecollaborations exhibited here were originally contributed to the Electronic Cafe/Community Memory Pictorial Database during the course of the project in 1984. The original storage & retrieval pictorial database contains 20,000 images.
These images have been scanned from ECI's slide and video printout collection. Limited documentation of other telecollaborative projects such as the Satellite Arts Project (1977), Hole-In-Space (1980), Art-Com (1982), Light-Transition (1983), and selected images from more recent cyberarts activities at Electronic Cafe International are included.
Taken together, this small sampling spans the first twenty years of the work of Galloway & Rabinowitz and their many collaborators and telecollaborators from around the world giving insights into the artistic aspirations and the evolution of continuously emerging new contexts, genres, and aesthetic inquiries into creative human-to-human interactions when mediated through and in concert with telecollaborative technology.
