Pioneers Lost – Whatever happened to Televanilla?

The research presents a critical inquiry of the impact of cybernetic concepts on the development of interactive media art, particularly on the complex interrelation between the artist, the artwork, and the audience in process-oriented artworks. It investigates historical, cultural, technological, and theoretical concerns related to audience participation with a particular focus on the 1960s North American media avant-garde’s artistic experiments with analogue communication technology, and contextualises these experiments within the development of a conceptual framework for human-computer interaction in digital media art during the paradigmatic shift from late modernism to postmodernism. Specifically, it aims to ascertain materials and information related to a 1968 mixed-media dance performance at the Martinique Theatre in New York. Although it is said to be the first dance performance that integrated real-time interactive media as part of the performance through a custom build device, the event has not received any attention or referencing in the main publications concerned with the histories of interactive media art. The research investigates the role and importance of this 1968 media-performance for the development of interactive art, and examines its relevance within the discourses related to Interactive Mixed Reality Installations with respect to the aesthetics of digitally created spaces.