Electronic Cafe International: A global network of public venues dedicated to creative telecollaborations and the exploration and exhibition of creative uses of real-time human-to-human multimedia telecommunications.
ECI is the next step in a lineage that begins... In 1977, when we worked with NASA, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting [CPB] and the National Endowment for the Arts [NEA] to do a series of aesthetic research projects called "The Satellite Arts Project", a live interactive "virtual space" satellite performance between dancers at both ends of the U.S.A. In those days, satellites were the only practical means to move live video over oceans,thus allowing geographically dispersed participants to appear together in the same video generated landscape,live, and to perform together as if in the same place. In 1982 we created and produced a lab at Loyolla Marymount University,"Aesthetic Research in TeleCommunications [ART-COM], The lab was conducted entirely in virtual space. Multi-disciplinary graduate students, helped study and describe the phenomenological experiences of the "image as place."
Some of our older work continues to have an influence on us and the network, like the unmediated communication of "Hole-In-Space": A Public Communication Sculpture," 1980. For three evenings in November we lit up giant, rear projection screens with life-sized images connected by satellite in a window at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, in New York City, and a window in The Broadway Store in Century City in LA. The installation was unannounced, NO PUBLICITY, no signs, no explanations, no local self-view video monitors. People encountered life-sized images of people in the other city whom they could see, hear, and talk with.
For seven weeks in 1984 we manifest Electronic Cafe (The original cyber cafe network) as part of the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival. We used LA as a model for an international multi-lingual, multicultural network. We linked cafes/restaurants in several language groups and culturally diverse communities throughout L A with a UNIX-based computer network featuring a keyword searchable index so that people could find topics of discussion or establish new topics. We embellished the computer network with the ability to store and retrieve thousands of captured video images and collaboratively created line drawing in a multimedia archive that the public contributed to and could retrieve. All sites were able to exchange or conference in video, audio, and use the collaboratively drawing alone or to annotate the video images together in a realtime shared-screen environment a decade ahead of the www.
After Electronic Cafe in 1984 we felt that we had reached "the limits of model." All of our previous work begged to be developed. The next step was "community," a permanent multimedia collaborative public network. In 1988 ECI opened with its first international link with Paris.
Creative Integration--technically, socially, artistically, ECI operates simultaneously and interactively on many levels.
Check out "Highlights" on the ECI home page. All of these Highlights have some off-line video recorded and, in some cases site documentation, paper documents, drawings, and photos. Many Highlights were technological firsts and many of them represent different collaborations with different venders. They represent original telecollaboritive projects, many already have spin-offs and have been copies. Look for the telecollaboration of artists; look for the collaboration between artists and technology-technicians; think of the telecollaborations required to co-produce activities like these across a network. Look for the public inclusive environs. Look at the number of telecollaborative events performed publicly, or that involved public participation.
It's clear that in the virtual environment of information and electronic communications the modes of communications, the connecting networks and the human relationships that are created and maintained through them are of increasing value and importance .The ECI Network is, as a community, committed to building new international models of collaboration and community. It is for this reason that the bringing together of the best of the VRML artists and world builders to construct an ECI VRML space that reflects the spirit of the ECI community was so exciting and humbling. this is the beginning,--community that embraces access to dreams with the reality so reflected in the work, talent commitment and energy in this real gathering of the VRML community.
Reality What a Concept...These are just some of the reflections from the world builders and artists who helped to construct this ECI VRML world.
| HOME | VRML WEEKEND | QUICKTIME VR | PLUG-INS | GOALS |
| PHOTO GALLERY | PLANNING | VRML 1.0 | VRML 2.0 | CREDITS |