to Roland Barthes' book «Le Plaisir du Texte.»[51] From December 11­23, 1983 the project was online twenty-four hours daily. Another computer-assisted collaborative writing project took place for the «Les Immatériaux» show curated by Jean-François Lyotard at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1985. Jacques Derrida, Michel Butor, Daniel Buren and some twenty other French intellectuals were each furnished with a private Minitel line (Minitel was the very successful French version of the German Btx system). Visitors to the exhibition were able to follow in real time the ensuing online discussion of specific terms. Due above all to the increased usage of mailing lists and text-based MOOs and MUDs as the Internet became more accessible, the 1990s saw the beginning of an entirely new phase of collective networked «authoring projects.»

From the «large» analog media of the late 1980s to the «small» digital media of the 1990s: Spatial and network interconnections

According to Robert Adrian X, the «Planetary Network» designed by Roy Ascott for the 1986 Venice Biennial brought to a close the first phase of artistic

telecommunication projects. The years up to the mid-1990s and the advent of wide Internet access were an intermediary phase marked by opposing currents. A snapshot-like view of the different positions is offered by volume 103 of the journal Kunstforum International, which marked the 1989 Ars Electronica festival with an issue dedicated to the theme «In the Network of Systems.» While Peter Weibel's article emphasized the notion of «interactive art,» the artist's contributions can be divided up into works operating with the (old) medium of radio, and ones «already hinting at a new artistic identity in line with telematic technologies.»[52] The articles by Roy Ascott, Robert Adrian X and Carl Loeffler fell into the second category. While Ascott[53] stood for an almost uninterrupted «metaphysics of the data and interfaces» (Ries), and to this extent was congruent with the above-mentioned (pseudo-)metaphysical ambitions in the work of Douglas Davis, a disillusioned article by Adrian X about his earlier «The World in 24 Hours» (1982) declared the project to be «historically obsolete.» He stated as reasons the lack not only of a technical revolution (he was writing some five years before the Internet became widely accessible), but