Clara Royer

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, artists experimenting with telecommunications began to connect across borders, rapidly expanding local experiments into a vibrant transnational network of collaborative actions that spanned the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. This avant-garde movement, known as telematic art, hinged on a pivotal technological breakthrough: slow-scan television (SSTV). An early forerunner of today’s videoconferencing systems, SSTV enabled real-time, low-cost visual communication over great distances, supporting a variety of creative practices that ranged from live image exchanges to remote interactive performances.  

Throughout the 1980s, artists like Liza Béar, Nam June Paik, and Aldo Tambellini embraced this new medium, recognizing its potential to generate experimental image flows that could transcend geographical, cultural, and ideological divides. But the politics and economics of radio frequencies and the realities of international spectrum management soon tempered their initial idealism, as their experiments were challenged by the complexities of a global communication landscape fraught with inequalities and regulatory constraints. 

My dissertation, the first to position SSTV as a key art-historical object, contends that artists’ engagement with this technology coincided with the rise of a new media ethic, marking a significant geopolitical reorientation in the shared history of art and technology. Tracing the roots of telematic art to the late 1970s, I show how it emerged in response to the Non-Aligned Movement’s advocacy for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) and the broader push for a more equitable allocation of the frequency spectrum across the global North-South divide—all within the broader framework of neoliberalism and the deregulation of telecommunications. I demonstrate how artists critically engaged with SSTV to creatively navigate these tensions, raising essential questions about high-tech elitism, cultural imperialism, and what media theorist Herbert I. Schiller termed “electronic colonialism.”