Passageways

This chapter investigates the transitional period during which early ’80s spatial and media practices developed into the emerging field of new media art in the Netherlands. This part of the book explores how the rhetoric of interactivity initially developed around television, starting with the 1985 media art festival Talking Back to the Media. By the end of the decade and in the first few years of the ’90s, a series of “networked events”— events that utilized nascent internet technology—were staged, establishing a link between former squatters (and their tactics) and the radical leftwing media art platforms, practices, and theory of the ’90s.