Van Gogh TV's "Piazza Virtuale": The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992 by Tilman Baumgärtel (review)

Reviewed by:

• Van Gogh TV's "Piazza Virtuale": The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992 by Tilman Baumgärtel
• Katie Mackinnon (bio)

Van Gogh TV's "Piazza Virtuale": The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992 By Tilman Baumgärtel with Julien Weinert. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022. Pp. 234.

Van Gogh TV's "Piazza Virtuale" provides a theoretical and historical framework for the development of Piazza virtuale, an artist-run interactive television program that broadcast for one hundred days in the summer of 1992 and was organized by the artist group Van Gogh TV.

Baumgärtel suggests that "Van Gogh TV's Piazza virtuale inhabits its own unique space in the pre-history of internet culture, virtual communities and internet art" (p. 13), which he demonstrates through a discussion of practices and policies that seem to preemptively mimic the same issues, policies, and debates in contemporary social media platforms.

During the show, audience members would call in by phone, fax, or computer chat—embodying Brecht's "radio theorie" of consumers becoming producers of media content. The artists describe this as an attempt to introduce performance art with audience participation into the mass medium of television. However, maintaining an ethos of "unhindered free expression" on the open call-in line was challenged when a viewer insulted German chancellor Helmut Kohl live on air. The station then appointed Katrin Brinkmann, a freelancer in a "low-level" position, who became responsible for moderating calls and kicking people off the line should they express "obscenities or political propaganda."

Baumgärtel briefly compares Brinkmann's role and that of social media content moderation policies, which social media companies have been grappling with for over a decade. He similarly draws parallels to insidious workplace practices and corporate relationships in creative cultural industries, which were also present at Van Gogh TV, and draws attention to the ways in which camaraderie and creative passion seem to foster unjust labor [End Page 420] conditions, such as long hours, hot rooms with minimal breaks, hierarchies of inequity, and gender-based discrimination. He quotes one of the founders, who states, "The people we had were like racehorses. We always had to whip them to keep them running" (p. 106).

Through these admissions, we can come to understand that, rather than providing much evidence that they invented social media, there was a culture present in the Federal Republic of Germany, as there was elsewhere, in which ideals of democracy and participation from the 1970s onward inspired the first steps into the newly discovered "cyberspace." This discovery became enmeshed in politics of masculinist logics of creative freedom and control.

Other recent monographs have similarly positioned historical technological events within the longer genealogy of social media and networked communication, such as the recent McIlwain's Black Software (2019), Driscoll's The Modem World (2022), and Dame-Griff's The Two Revolutions (2023), as well as other collections on alternative histories of the Net (Haigh, Russell, and Dutton, "Histories of the Internet," 2015). These projects do effectively and critically engage with the roots and foundations upon which social media was built, but they also provide avenues through which we can resist and reimagine different networked and social media futures.

Van Gogh TV's "Piazza Virtuale", by calling attention to artist movements in Germany around 1992, also suggests that the economic roots of social media extend beyond histories specific to North American—or Silicon Valley—ideologies, as has been previously demonstrated (Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 2006). This project provides an important provocation for other history of technology scholars working outside of American teleological histories of linear progress to investigate the conditions that have contributed to the ubiquity and structures of social media today.

What sets Baumgärtel's project apart is its fine attunement to the archiving demands this historical event required. The author writes, "We gradually began to understand that we could only access such a rich trove of material because it was mostly analogue. Whatever was digital in the estate of Van Gogh TV had practically become inaccessible in the more than two decades since Piazza virtuale" (p. 13). Similarly, if it had taken place a few years later...