The ARPANET Dialogues Vol. III: ARPANET Test March 1976 with Joseph Beuys, Juan Downey, Rosalind Krauss & Henry Moore :: Published on 1 November 2011. Presented as a contribution to the project/publication The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict.

“… The occasion of this conversation was suggested by Donald Lupton, a computer scientist and researcher working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a lab funded by DARPA. Lupton has been commissioned with restarting the Agency’s art and culture propaganda project, which has lain relatively dormant since the early 60s. Unbeknownst to the four participants, this conversation is an early test case for exploring new forms of cultural dissemination with the aim of using Western intellectuals for spreading democratic values. Please note that the respective computer terminals for each participant were identified by the names of gods from Roman mythology and have here been changed to reflect the actual names of the participants. The application, still in its early stage of development, had limited syntax capability, thus punctuation was limited to the full stop. Also, the original timestamps for each transmission have been removed for the sake of legibility.

Addendum: Upon completion of this discussion, Krauss, who was quite impressed by the novelty of the telecommunications medium as a way to internationalize artistic discourse, has requested the transcript for publication in the first issue of October journal. Lupton has reported her intentions back to the Agency, and the publishers at MIT Press have suppressed the publication. A copy of the transcript remains in the MIT Press archives.” Continue reading >>