more precursors – a kisstory

You can make a story of telematic communication by looking at how people experiment with distanced kissing over time. Can you?

(Image from the collections of Galloway & Rabinowitz)

In 1975, five years before their groundbreaking Hole-in-Space piece, Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway used a selfmade experimental setup in the Sony Salon on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. Kit had a key and so they could use it after the opening hours of the showroom.
Kit and Sherrie did a lot of “Aesthetic Research in Telecommunications.” When I visit the website that documents this, I recognize they discovered and practiced probably all formal possibilities of being together in a composite image space. A feast of recognition.
They used split-screen, key images, life tv-footage and sometimes props. In what they called the space with no geographical borders they wanted to get rid of all borders, the split-screen border included and the above image of their kiss is an excellent example of the sensuality the merging of image-ambassadors can provoke.

Later this technique was used by Paul Sermon in Telematic Dreaming, a ISDN digital telephone installation from 1993. Nowadays, Daniel Pinheiro in Will you dance with me?! (2017) starts working in this direction. Station House Opera (among others) in 2016 was also using this technique in the At Home in Gaza and London performance project.

A Telematic Kissing Timeline?

• Early twentieth century Telegraphic Kiss. (postcard see at the bottom)
• 1938 Facsimile telegraph transmission kiss (article in Popular Mechanics )
• 1957 Jerry Lewis and Celeste Holm split-screen kiss – live via terrestrial microwave linked TV. Image, info, video here.
• 1974  Nam June Paik and Shirley Clarke splitscreen kiss – technical design of the installation by David Cort of the Videofreex. Image, info here.
• 1975 Kit Galloway, and Sherrie Rabinowitz composite image space, using Sony Salon technology – In 1977 they start experimenting with satelite transmission.
• 1997 Annie Abrahams A kiss html kiss by a computer.
• 2007 Annie Abrahams and Nicolas Frespech, One the puppet of the other, live split-screen internet performance.
• 2008 Annie Abrahams and Mark River The Big Kiss. Durational performance in an split-screen installation.
• 2011 “Kissenger” the world’s only kiss transfer device.
• 2014 Lancel and Maat develop E.E.G. Kiss, a tentative to device a communal kiss.

Image from the collections of Galloway & Rabinowitz  1938 http://blog.modernmechanix.com/telegraph-kisses-are-new-fad/

Telegraphic Kiss Postcard – early twentieth century. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/tag/vice/

Filed under: Of interest, Celeste Holm, Daniel Pinheiro, history, Jerry Lewis, Kissenger, kisstory, Kit Galloway, Lancel and Maat, Mark River, Nam June Paik, Nicolas Frespech, Paul Sermon, Sherrie Rabinowitz, Shirley Clarke, telematic communication, telematic kiss, The Big Kiss, timeline

Another precursor of The Big Kiss

A few days ago Kit Galloway after his Networked Conversation with Randall Packer in the Third Space Network send Randall what might be the very first attempted transcontinental split-screen kiss – live via terrestrial microwave linked TV.

Jerry Lewis in Los Angeles and Celeste Holm in New York (She was an actress and the mother of Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext)  opened the 29th Academy Awards – the Oscars in 1957 with an “akward”, prude kiss.

The other precursor was 17 years later in 1974 and was by Nam June Paik and Shirley Clarke. More about the discovery of this last version by the Videofreex here.

Filed under: Of interest, Celeste Holm, Jerry Lewis, Kit Galloway, microwave transmission, networked performance, Randall Packer, Ted Nelson, The Big Kiss

Networked Conversations

Image courtesy of the Third Space Network

After Videofreex and Kit Galloway and before Gene Youngblood I’ll be Randall Packer‘s third guest in the Networked Conversations series.

Saturday May 13th 6pm – 7pm Paris time. (Find your local time here.)

To participate you should go to the Third Space Network.
https://connect.ntu.edu.sg/thirdspacenetwork/
Select “Guest,” type your name, and “Enter Room.”

Networked Conversations is a series of live, online interviews and discussions hosted by Randall Packer. The series features media artists, curators, writers, and activists exploring a broad range of social, political and aesthetic topics at the intersection of net culture. Networked Conversations collapses geographical and cultural boundaries via participatory Internet chat: free & open & accessible from anywhere in the world.
For more information visit:
http://www.thirdspacenetwork.com/

Filed under: Interview, Of interest, collaboration, history, Intimacy, networked performance, Randall Packer, Third Space Network