resources in the first half of the 1990s, the demand for reasonably priced ‹access for all› was common to all these projects. The perhaps best known virtual city was De Digitale Stad (DDS) in Amsterdam, which went online in January 1994. DDS fast became Europe's largest public «freenet.»[42] In late 1994, the International City Federation[43] (ICF, 1994­1997) was founded in Berlin on the model of DDS. Probably the most prominent Net project in Germany in the period 1995­1996, its aim as an independent Internet provider was to make it easier for cultural projects to build up an Internet presence. The IS offered its up to three hundred ‹inhabitants› low-priced Internet access and server capacity for experimentation–a service not to be underestimated at a time when private Internet access was beyond most people's means. Public Netbase, an institute for new cultural technologies founded in Vienna in March 1995, initially pursued similar objectives to the IS. After branching off in a direction different from that of either DDS or IS, Public Netbase increasingly became a content developer, and has most recently been organizing the «world-information.org» project running since 2000 in Brussels, Vienna, Amsterdam, Belgrade and Novi Sad.

Collective and collaborative authoring in telecommunications projects

Even before the 1990s Internet boom, artists were experimenting with complex communication structures and networked, collaborative authoring processes in text-based systems. With historical origins stretching back to the Surrealists and their «cadavre exquis» experiments, collective writing projects radically place in question the authorreader relationship[44] and correspond with deconstructivist notions of the text as fabric (Jacques Derrida), theories of intertextuality (Julia Kristeva), and the postmodern «death of the author» (Roland Barthes).

The «Artists' use of telecommunications» conference held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1980 brought together a number of artists who would take part in important artistic telecommunications projects in the years that followed. Artists outside the USA were linked up to the conference over satellite and a computer system made by I. P. Sharp (IPSN). The organizer, Bill Bartlett, was joined by guests including Gene Youngblood, Hank Bull (Vancouver), Douglas Davis and Willoughby Sharp (New York), Norman White (Toronto) and