Archeologie della Telepresenza

MEET Theater
December 2, 2025 from 4.30 pm

Archeologie della Telepresenza presents research conducted by Ca’ Foscari University and the University of Milan in the Le Radici del Nuovo archive at MEET. This excavation reopens the experimental artistic practices of the 1960s-1980s to recognize how certain creative gestures, often marginal, documented on outdated media, have shaped the perceptual infrastructure of the systems we use every day.

Video artists working with telephone networks, feedback, and remote transmissions were solving problems of latency, simultaneity, and separate physical presence. Their solutions—techniques for composing shots, strategies for managing delay, devices for restoring physicality through the screen—have migrated into the design protocols of contemporary digital platforms.

These archives show that before standardization, there was radical experimentation with the idea of being present when bodies are elsewhere. The research highlights modes of expression that anticipated communicative behaviors that are now taken for granted.

Recovering these materials means recognizing that our everyday devices incorporate artistic memory, that every interface has an aesthetic genealogy. It means understanding that telepresence was not invented by digital technology but imagined by those who used technology to make art.