Minitel
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/eduardo-kac-27162" aria-label="More by Eduardo Kac" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Eduardo Kac</a>
Horny
Lent by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2018
<p><span>Horny </span>(Tesão) 1985 is one of a group of works in Tate’s collection by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac in which he programmed a Minitel user-to-user messaging system to produce colourful text and designs as poems on the screen and set to run on a loop (the others being <span>Reabracadabra</span> 1985, Tate L04235, <span>De/i/ty </span>(D/eu/s) 1985–6, Tate T15200, and <span>Recaos</span> 1985–6. In the early 1980s, a precursor to the internet was implemented in different parts of the world, in which users logged on with a remote terminal – the Minitel – and accessed sequences of pages through regular phone lines. In Brazil, the network, known as ‘Videotexto’, was mostly available through public Minitel stations located in places like libraries and shopping malls. Kac perceived this technology as a new means for distributing poetry across a global environment, and widely experimented with the technical possibilities of the medium to create images and counter-meanings. These works were originally presented at Arte On-Line, a Minitel art gallery run by the telephone company Companhia Telefônica de São Paulo (1985) and at <span>Brasil High Tech</span> in the Galeria do Centro Empresarial Rio, Rio de Janeiro (1986).</p>
time-based media minitel
Horny
object: 245 × 250 × 245 mm
Lent by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2018
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<i>Horny </i>(Tesão) 1985 is one of a group of works in Tate’s collection by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac in which he programmed a Minitel user-to-user messaging system to produce colourful text and designs as poems on the screen and set to run on a loop (the others being <i>Reabracadabra</i> 1985, Tate L04235, <i>De/i/ty </i>(D/eu/s) 1985–6, Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kac-de-i-ty-t15200" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>T15200</span></a>, and <i>Recaos</i> 1985–6. In the early 1980s, a precursor to the internet was implemented in different parts of the world, in which users logged on with a remote terminal – the Minitel – and accessed sequences of pages through regular phone lines. In Brazil, the network, known as ‘Videotexto’, was mostly available through public Minitel stations located in places like libraries and shopping malls. Kac perceived this technology as a new means for distributing poetry across a global environment, and widely experimented with the technical possibilities of the medium to create images and counter-meanings. These works were originally presented at Arte On-Line, a Minitel art gallery run by the telephone company Companhia Telefônica de São Paulo (1985) and at <i>Brasil High Tech</i> in the Galeria do Centro Empresarial Rio, Rio de Janeiro (1986).</p>
<p>In<i> Horny </i>Kac experimented with the chromatic and painterly possibilities of the Minitel technology. The geometric forms in the opening sequence of this piece seem at first a playful quotation of the geometric abstraction that heavily characterised much of Brazil’s modernist painting (concretismo and neo-concretismo). However the forms on the screen gradually reveal the title of the work, ‘Tesão’ meaning ‘horny’ in Portuguese, as a hidden message, almost subliminally. Originally conceived as a virtual poem addressed to the artist’s girlfriend, the work probes whether it is possible to combine abstraction and sexual desire. <i>Horny</i> also anticipates the role of new technologies in the mediation and commodification of sex. The work provides formal experimentation with the Videotexto format, challenging users typically confronted with white lettering in their daily use of Minitels to read the technology in new ways.</p>
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<i>Horny </i>followed on from a slightly earlier Minitel work, <i>Reabracadabra</i> 1985, in which letters appear in an orbital path around a letter A, like subatomic particles or the moons of a planet, suggesting the infinite possibilities of words and their meanings in the galaxy of language. Kac’s experimentation challenged the limitations of what was at the time a very new medium, playfully evoking the magical effect that newly born virtual technologies have upon humans, especially when they have been modified against their mere utilitarian purposes. Kac’s art is a forerunner to computer animation, special effects and virtual reality technologies that now dominate visual culture. His word games, at once humorous and somewhat cynical in tone, seek to make space for ambiguity and poetry in the human attachment to these new technologies.</p>
<p>Prior to the Minitel works, Kac had been active through a series of performances, artist-made publications and media interventions in Rio de Janeiro that advocated sexual liberation and social change. He went on to experiment with Xerox and fax machine art before turning to the Minitel as means of proposing an alternative public space for communication and self-expression. He has continued to probe the philosophical dimensions and tensions caused by technology; in <i>Time Capsule</i> 1997, for example, he implanted a microchip into his body, while more recently in <i>Inner Telescope</i> 2016, he worked with NASA and astronauts in the International Space Station to remotely construct a work of art in outer space.</p>
<p>The Minitel network was dismantled in the early twenty-first century, threatening the loss of both Kac’s Minitel pieces and other early net art. Since then he has worked closely with a digital art preservation research team in Avignon, France, to convert the hardware of the terminal (which originally only sent and received information) into a computer (which processes and stores information) that runs programs matching the colour and rhythm of the original animations. In order to guarantee its preservation, and avoid technological obsolescence, a ‘hybrid screen’ was made out of two parts and adapted to the original hardware of the vintage Minitels. These screens have been custom-made with a curved front to fit precisely the dimensions of the Minitel terminal and to allow flat screens to be placed behind. The two parts are independent, thus enabling replacements of the flat screen, and for the viewer the experience is identical to watching the original screen. Each Minitel work now exists in an edition of three plus 1 artist’s proof; Tate’s copy of <i>Horny </i>is number three in the edition.</p>
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<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Eduardo Kac (ed.), <i>Media Poetry: An International Anthology</i>, Bristol 2007.<br/>Eduardo Kac (ed.), <i>Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond</i>, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London 2007.<br/>Anders Carlsson, ‘When Net Art Outlives the Net: Eduardo Kac’s Poetry for Videotexto’, <i>Rhizome.org</i>, 3 November 2016, <a href="https://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/nov/03/when-net-art-outlives-the-net-eduardo-kacs-poetry-for-videotexto/">https://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/nov/03/when-net-art-outlives-the-net-eduardo-kacs-poetry-for-videotexto/</a>, accessed 17 November 2017.</p>
<p>Michael Wellen and Inti Guerrero<br/>November 2017</p>
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Summary
2023-10-20T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT