Douglas Davis
«Seven Thoughts»

I was obsessed with using satellites. It was the great unknown and therefore exotic. I wanted to use it to broadcast very avantgarde, conceptual video that no one expected or desired. At that time, no artist had gotten his or her hands on any satellite. We thought we'd be lucky to convince a TV network to allow a ‹live› performance or show a few minutes of video art. I decided this was tame. I thought that this was not worth all the time and boot-licking. I decided to try to get the satellite for myself, even in a tiny way.
[…] We decided to rent time on the ComSat satellite for an uncompromising performance. Apparently it was the first time that any private citizen had done this. That was a wonder to me because our tax dollars created the satellite system -- then why weren’t we allowed to use it?
When it was sure that the whole piece would take place in Houston, I thought of the Astrodome. At
that time, this was the largest roof stadium in the world. But more importantly, it was circular. The link between the satellite and the dome was most important to me. Eventually we managed to get the permission to use the Astrodome on the evening of December 29, 1976, because on this day it was empty. It was not being used, so it was cheap to rent. Otherwise it wouln’t have happened at all, since neither the museum nor I had a dime to spare. If Giuseppe Panza, the collector from Milan, hadn't given us the cash for the piece, I could not have uttered the «Seven Thoughts».
[…]
There was nobody in the Astrodome except for the people involved in the performance. But people could have picked up the signal anywhere in the world. TV and radio stations could have retrieved our signal and broadcast it. The «Seven Thoughts» were free thoughts. We sent a telegram to all ComSat receiving nodes. I offered seven very personal thoughts to the people. Stressing the privacy of the transmission mattered. I wasn't offering an imperialistic mass message, but personal contact with somebody … with you … wherever you were.
It all began at 9:30 p.m. We could only afford to rent that huge place with its lights and its scoreboard for thirty minutes. At 9:28, just when I had to begin, a groundskeeper came in with a phone and yelled: «Bombay, India, is calling! You have to tell them what the seven thoughts are before they'll broadcast it on the radio.» But I had no time to spare: «Tell them it's a good will message for the new year», I said, and ran out on the field, to begin exactly at 9:30.
That's when the silent performance began, viewed from cameras above, suspended from the dome's ceiling, I walked in circles carrying the small black box containing the seven thoughts. About 20 minutes later, I reached the middle of the Astrodome, where a microphone was lowered from above. Between 9:50 and 10:00, I spoke up through the roof of the stadium to the orbiting satellite down to the ears of the world. We only had ten minutes of direct transmission. I loved that compression and density. Then, after I had said the «Seven Thoughts» into the microphone, I locked the little black box where the thoughts remain to this day.

(source: Douglas Davis, in: Tilman Baumgärtel: [net.art] New Materials towards Net art, Nürnberg 2001, pp. 54ff.)