Van Gogh TV, an avant-garde group of media artists and hackers, presented Piazza virtuale at Documenta IX in 1992. The interactive TV project used all the electronic media available at the time to include the television audience – that could watch the program both on the 3Sat television channel and the Olympus satellite – in what was happening on the screen.
A research project funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) is now researching the oeuvre of Van Gogh TV and sees itself as a paradigmatic attempt to historically process early online projects and communities and to secure them for the long term. So far, there has been little research on the preservation and historization of these highly fragile digital artefacts and relics of telecommunication projects. In addition to an academic publications, the project will also produce a medium-length documentary film and an exhibition.
