001 Connected
It is summer 2010, and it is only 14 years since I got my first cell phone using the GSM network, and it is only 16 years since I got my first email adress at the Well in Sausalito near San Francisco, a start up company run by Kevin Kelly. My first cell phone I used when we run the paraSITE project in Rotterdam, my first use of the Internet in 1994 to cater the multidisciplinary event Sculpture City. We were early movers among the international population of architects, simply because we were interested to apply new technologies in our profession. I purchased my first pc, the notorious Atari 1024ST, around 1988. I used it to model in 3d my design for the Theo van Doesburg exhibition in the Museum Boymans van Beuningen. Meanwhile Ilona used the Atari to sketch intuitively, exploring early 3d programs like STAD3D. During the years 1988 and 1989 we lived and worked one year in Meudon, in the atelier Theo van Doesburg. Before we came I purchased a fax-telephone machine, which did cost me more then 3000 HFL at that time, to communicate with the AA in London where I was unit master for Intermediate Unit 12 and with my client Evert van Straaten for the Doesburg exhibition in Rotterdam. As from late eighties and beginning of nineties of the last century we got networked with the world via Internet, cell phones and fax machines. We knew instinctivily that we needed to explore the potential of our new condition for art and architecture, which inspired us to organize a series of events: Artificial Intuition in Galerie Aedes in Berlin and TU Delft [1990], Synthetic Dimension and Global Satellite in the Zonnehof in Amersfoort [1991], Sculpture City in Rotterdam and the Internet [1994], Genes of Architecture in Rotterdam, Vienna, Budapest and Berlin [1995]. After having experienced the promise of ICT in architecture and art, Ilona and I decided to build our practice of the fusion of art and architecture on a digital platform, enabling us to exchange information and raw data with many other disciplines, like composers, engineers, graphic designers. We felt that we just got to do it, as we know now, well ahead of our times.