Van Gogh TV. Critical Edition, Multimedia-documentation and analysis of their Estate.

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Jens Schröter; Professorin Anja Stöffler
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 388224396

The goal of the project is to study the groundbreaking work of Van Gogh TV, a collective of hackers and artists who created pioneering online-communication platforms in the early 1990s. With projects like Piazza Virtuale, their contribution to the documenta 1992, they provided a blueprint for the collaborative and communicative possibilities of contemporary Social Media such as Facebook or Twitter.Using the technological tools available to them before the advent of the internet, they tried to create a type of collaborative media practice, a many-to-many-network that was meant to be an alternative to the traditional model of the mass media. This media practice included regular nightly shows on television stations in Germany, Austria and Japan, the use of Fax, Slow Scan Television and the Bulletin Board Services (BBS).To create this type of communication situation, the group had to build their own devices and program their own software, and many of their inventions anticipitated todays developments in online media, telerobotics and the Internet of Things. However, due to the complete inaccessibility of their estate in the last two decades, their work has not yet entered the historical canon of pioneering media projects. The project will use four approaches towards its subject. First of all, the estate of the group has to be readied for long-term preservation. Over 2000 hours of analogue videos, the complete paper files of Piazza Virtuale and digital files and emails regarding the project will be transferred to long-term storage media and handed over to the documenta Archiv in Kassel, where they will be accessible to other scholars.Secondly, a good number of the over 50 participants of Van Gogh TV will be interviewed in order to create an oral history of the project that will contextualize the archival material. The oral history will be published as a monograph in its own right.This material will be the basis for a theoretical study of the groups work and the coming-into-being of new types of media. The oeuvre of Van Gogh TV is an ideal subject to study the way technological advances are anticipitated before they become reality. Using a number of different theoretical approaches on how Utopian thinking leads to media innovation (e. g. Zielinski, Huhtamo, Parikka, Daniels), we aim to place the work of Van Gogh TV in a framework of theories of media development. For that purpose, we are also making plans for three conferences with international scholars and experts.Taking advantage of the unique collaboration between a university and a School of Applied Art, the material will also be the basis for an exhibition, a film documentary and a website that will present our research to an audience beyond academia.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Tilman Baumgärtel