Before Skype existed: On artists who always arrive too early

In November 1980, two American media artists rented satellite time from an intermediary broker — roughly $3,900 for twelve hours, about $5.40 a minute, which counted as a bargain — and connected a department store in Los Angeles with Lincoln Center in New York. No signs. No sponsors. No instructions explaining what the screens were or what you were supposed to do with them.

People simply walked past, noticed a life-sized crowd staring back at them from 3,000 miles away, and stopped.

Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz called it Hole-in-Space. On day one, strangers tested the link cautiously, waving, playing charades. By day two, people came back with friends. Day three saw families using it for reunions — tears, packed crowds, emotional displays nobody had planned for. The whole thing ran for three days and never repeated.

The half-second that changed everything

Physics got in the way, as it tends to. The signal had to travel 22,000 miles up to a geostationary orbit and back down, which introduced a built-in half-second delay. Galloway and Rabinowitz described it as “molasses movement” — people had to learn to pause after speaking, adjusting to a constraint nobody had briefed them on. Crucially, they didn’t clean it up or engineer it away. The latency was just there, and people worked around it, because the thing on the other side was worth the awkwardness.

FaceTime arrived thirty years later. Zoom became mandatory infrastructure during a pandemic, nearly forty years after that first connection over Century City.

When the moon edits the music

In 2007, Scottish artist Katie Paterson took Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and transmitted it to the moon. Not metaphorically — she translated the score into Morse code and beamed it at the lunar surface using Earth-Moon-Earth radio transmission, a technique long used by amateur radio operators. The moon, however, is not a polished mirror. It’s a heavily cratered rock, and portions of the signal disappeared into those craters, absorbed by the lunar topography, simply gone.

The signal that returned was incomplete. Paterson translated it back into a musical score, and the missing notes became rests. The craters became silence.

In a gallery, a self-playing grand piano performs the resulting composition. It’s recognizable as the Moonlight Sonata, but halting — full of unexpected pauses, slightly wrong in ways you can’t immediately place. The moon physically edited the piece. The errors are the point.

Both Earth-Moon-Earth and Hole-in-Space work the same way, even if they look nothing alike. Each takes infrastructure built for something else entirely — military satellites, cold war communications, amateur radio — and lets its physical constraints become the artistic material. The latency stays. The lost data stays. Because the limitations are honest.

Two computers having a pointless conversation

Around the same time as Paterson’s moonbounce piece, I was finishing my degree at Kingston University. My final show installation, Ruby & Eliza, involved two computers on plinths having a conversation with each other — both running instances of the Alice chatbot software, voices synthesized through Windows SAPI5 text-to-speech. The dialogue went in circles the way rule-based systems do. One screen showed Ruby saying: “I use a sophisticated neural network. Studies show that 99.425% of people spell Mum with 2 M’s.”

People stood and listened, genuinely unsettled. In a room full of paintings and sculptures, two computers talking confident nonsense drew the longest crowd.

That was 2007 — roughly fifteen years before “two AI systems confidently producing plausible-sounding misinformation” became something anyone could generate in thirty seconds and call a chatbot.

During the same period, I built Zero One, a hamster under continuous surveillance: cameras, wheel-rotation sensors, live stream, the full panopticon in miniature. The project ended abruptly when the hamster escaped during a party. I also made The Longest Circuit, a light switch wired through the internet so the signal circumnavigated the globe before illuminating a bulb three feet away — and Profit in War, where website visitors could trigger an egg dropping onto a gallery globe. All three used the internet as material, not distribution.

Bloody hell, You were early

Six months ago, someone emailed me about Ruby & Eliza: bloody hell, you were early. It’s warm to receive. However, there’s something quietly frustrating about it too.

Because here’s the pattern: artists find the infrastructure before it has a name, before there’s a product team optimising it for retention, before there’s an onboarding flow. Galloway and Rabinowitz had to negotiate with Western Union for satellite access because no established market existed for independent artists renting satellite time. The industry didn’t know what category to put them in, so they worked around it. Paterson used moonbounce radio because it was the only protocol that would physically interact with the lunar surface. I connected a hamster to the internet because I was curious what happened when you applied surveillance logic to something that had absolutely no idea it was being watched.

None of us were trying to predict the future. We were just using available infrastructure for purposes it wasn’t designed for, and noticing what it revealed.

The products came later, with their interfaces and terms of service. Galloway and Rabinowitz didn’t get royalties when Zoom went public. That’s not bitterness — it’s simply how the history gets written. The products get the names. The artists get the footnote.

What actually disappears

What I keep returning to is the thing that disappears when the technology scales.

Hole-in-Space worked because nobody knew what it was. The absence of instructions wasn’t an oversight — it was the work itself. People had to invent their own relationship to the screen, the stranger, the distance. The delay forced a kind of attention, because no habit existed yet to fill the gap.

Now everyone knows what a video call is. You join, you mute yourself on entry, you wait for someone to share their screen. The infrastructure is better, faster, cheaper, and fits in your pocket. But the possibility space has collapsed.

What gets lost when technology democratises isn’t the access. It’s the surprise.

Whether that loss is worth grieving, or simply the inevitable cost of something becoming useful to everyone — I genuinely don’t know.