also–and primarily–of a revolution in interpersonal communications: «The high costs for hardware are only a part of the problem–much more decisive are the sluggishness and persistence of two hundred years of industrial culture and its consumerist aftermath. Nobody in our culture, artists included, is educated or encouraged to let others have a share in their creative activity. However, this capability for shared creative activity is a prerequisite of the interactive usage of communications technology.»[54] A wholly different tone was struck by Carl Loeffler,[55] co-founder (with Fred Truck) of the Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) mailbox in 1986, whose contribution presented a dispositive that «took up all the utopias of the early network projects and at the same time intermeshed the borders between art and other social (above all, economic) zones.»[56] With that, ACEN conceptually prefigured the 1990s Internet projects and their «small» digital media.

Equally typical of this intermediate phase were art projects that used ‹large› analog media like radio and TV and often took the form of elaborately organized travel projects. Viewed with the benefit of hindsight,

groups or projects like Minus Delta t, Radio Subcom,[57] Ponton/Van Gogh TV and the art-space ship MS Stubnitz almost seem to have been trying to make up for the lack of digital networks by packing their well-equipped media laboratories into buses, containers, trucks and ships. However, behind their physical mobility lay primarily the idea of communicative, interpersonal networking. The Ponton/Van Gogh TV[58] group typifies the bridging of the gap between intermedia concepts and the electronic media. Several important members including Karel Dudesek, Benjamin Heidersberger, Gerard Couty and Mike Hentz are rooted in the group Minus Delta t,[59] which was founded in 1978 and achieved prominence with the «Bangkok Project.» Launched in 1980, this project was based on the concept of transporting a six-ton block of granite by truck from Europe to Asia, and in the process staging an all-embracing art happening with events and performances in the cities that lay en route. An essential part of the whole was the deployment of all available media to document the events. With the presentation of a container city entitled «Ponton Project» at the 1986 Ars Electronica