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Leonardo 34.3 (2001) 181


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The Leonardo Gallery

Bruno Beusch and Tina Cassani

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Bruno Beusch and Tina Cassani's TNC Network is the creative force behind hybrid events celebrating the complexities and ironies of our emerging digital culture and promoting the concept of international collaboration. Established in 1995 and employing an interdisciplinary crew, TNC has produced network-based projects for the Internet, TV, radio, and various arts festivals. Events include the humorous and imaginative 1997 Clone Party, in which, for a period of 16 hours, TNC connected events at clubs and museums in cities on three continents (Tokyo, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, Linz, Lausanne, San Francisco) over the Internet via ether and satellite. The global audience included over 400,000 "partygoers" who explored the implications of cloning through ironic and humorous events like Biagio Imparato's demonstration of the effects of "nutell acloning" on music, and a stimulating roundtable with a biocomputer specialist, a social technician and a museum curator, who discussed tomatoes and personality.

Another innovative TNC collaboration was the network-based media fiction--referred to as a "techno-thriller" by its creators--The Great Web Crash (shown here, ©TNC Network, 1996-1998), coproduced with partners that included Musée National des Techniques, Paris; HotWired, San Francisco; and Inter Medium Institute, Osaka. For this event, TNC created a Planetary Information Breakdown on the Internet and on several radio stations throughout Europe. Radio TNC, one of Europe's earliest Internet radios, became an Emergency Web Station, functioning as the platform for an extended collaboration. The result may have been the first programmed Web crash in recorded human history. New episodes of the fiction were cohosted by partners in Europe, America and Japan. The intercontinental tale of the "crash," with its victims "disappearing into the virtual beyond," intrigued Internet users and radio listeners and inspired numerous spin-offs.

(Tina Cassani and Bruno Beusch, TNC Network, 51, rue Piat, F-75020 Paris, France. E-mail: <cassani@cnam.fr>.)

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