Telecommunications Art and Play:
Intercities Sao Paulo/Pittsburgh

ABSTRACT
Intercities Sao Paulo/Pittsburgh was a telecommunications event linking Brazilian art researchers in Sao Paulo with American colleagues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The event consisted of lectures by Brazilian and American participants and interactive pieces created by artists from the two cities. Intercities explored new forms of exchanging information through slow-scan television and examined the issue of telecommunications as an art medium. The event provided both participants and audience with a sense of personal interaction with people geographically and culturally distant and demonstrated the beneficial aspects of widespread telecommunications.

Intercities Sao Paulo/Pittsburgh no "1988" telecommunications event connecting a group of Brazilian art researchers in Sao Paulo with American colleagues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Instituto de Pesquisa em Arte e Tecnologia (IPAT) [I], an institute for research in art and technology at the Museum of Image and Sound in Sao Paulo, and the Digital Arts Exchange (DAX) [2] group, affiliated with Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, had previously conducted several private experimental links in 1987. In lntercities, as in the earlier projects, the two teams worked in close collaboration to find new modalities for informational interchange through slow-scan television (SSTV).

PREPARATION AND PLANNING
Intercities [3] was designed to have an experimental and self-reflexive character and aimed at exploring new forms for sending, receiving and exchanging information through SSTV. We hoped that the system itself, which provided for the informational exchange of television and audio signals through long-distance telephony, could be investigated by the works that would be transmitted.
The question of telecommunications as an art medium was proposed as the central theme to be examined theoretically as well as practically. The concepts of bidirectionality and interactivity would frame the communication process to be settled on. The technical structure and the programming were designed to promote a balanced interaction between telecommunications terminals in Sao Paulo and in Pittsburgh.

Fig. 1: The opening SSTV frame transmitted from Sao Paulo to Pittsburgh,
Intercities, 25 January 1988. (Photo: Paulo Laurentiz), ©1991|SAST
Pergamon Press pic. Printed in Great Britain.

The first 10 minutes of the event were reserved for an informal presentation and the mutual acquaintance of the crews. Then the exchange of various talks would begin. The artistic director of the DAX group, Bruce Breland, was invited to lecture from Pittsburgh to the Sao Paulo audience. Paulo Laurentiz and I, both members of IPAT, would be talking from Sao Paulo to the Carnegie-Mellon terminal.
An interactive exchange via SSTV was also planned. A two-way telecommunications system was envisioned that would allow an unheard-of modality in SSTV experiments: visual dialogue.
The system could only have been conceived and later produced because each crew was able to obtain at least two SSTV sending-receiving units. Bidirectionality would always be present because, in each terminal, one unit would be continuously receiving and the other continuously transmitting. Two telephone lines would be operating simultaneously. Interactivity would become possible because operators at each terminal would be able to modify their messages while considering the slowly incoming information.
The process would require a new attitude toward the artwork and a new creative strategy for aesthetic discourse. Image sequences could no longer be structured as visual monologues. Artists would have to propose dialogical pieces that would properly utilize the system's visual interactivity.
Two periods of 20 min each, entitled "Interactive Language Research", were programmed for the actualization of the process. Initiative would belong to Pittsburgh in the first period and to Sao Paulo in the second. Those periods would allow for the investigation of new forms of interactivity: the playing of games, the performance of plays and eventually public participation. Artists from both cities prepared written proposals for pieces they hoped to presen t as part of the event.
A 10-min period of tele-interviews was initially proposed, but was dropped from the program due to time constraints.

Artur Matuck (author), Department of Plastic Ans, School of Communication and Arts, University orsao Paulo, Sao Paulo, SP 05508. Brazil; Studio for Creative Inquiry, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, U.S,A.
Received 29 January' 1990.