Hole in Space

From Audcwiki, the free encyclopedia.

In November 1980, "Hole in Space" was opened in New York and Los Angeles. Created by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Hole in Space was a “Public Communication Sculpture” that, unannounced to the public, turned two walls, one at the Los Angeles’s Century City Shopping Center and another at New York’s Lincoln Center, into portals. Video cameras transmitted images from each site to the other where they were beamed, full size onto walls. Microphones and speakers facilitated audio transmissions.

Hole in Space lasted three nights. During the first night, encounters were casual and accidental. Many of the first visitors did not believe it was live or thought that the ghostly black and white specters on the wall were actors on a nearby set. Disbelief soon gave way to the creation of a new social space, to the invention of games and the telling of jokes. As word spread, separated friends and family made arrangements to meet at the portals on the second evening. On the third night, after Hole in Space was featured on television news, so many people attempted to participate in this shared human experience that traffic ground to a halt and the experiment was forced to end by the authorities.

In a video recorded during the event, one woman asks why Hole in Space hadn’t been created twenty years ago. Twenty five years later, after so much attention has been given to the Internet, and after Net Art has become widespread, Galloway and Rabinowitz's project is forgotten.

next: A Planetary World Network