broad spectrum of interpretation the term admitted: Interaction encompasses both the theory of interrelated social action, as well as the primarily technological category of human-machine communication generally termed interactivity.[7] From the 1960s to the 1990s, the social notion of interaction was replaced by a more technologically and media-based definition of interactivity (humanmachine interaction). Dieter Daniels compounds this paradigm shift with the following theory: While in the 1960s the media were still regarded as one of several means employable in order to achieve the socio-cultural utopia of a transformed society, an aboutturn took place in the 1990s, a decade in which media technology was often seen as «the leitmotif from which all social, cultural and economic transformations [would] emanate.»[8] However, after the notion of social interaction had been superseded by that of a primarily technological interactivity in the early 1990s, by the middle of that decade the rise of the Internet

was restoring social significance to the paired notions of interaction/ interactivity, which now increasingly described media-assisted human interchange, and therefore linked up with the ideals of intermedia art in the 1960s as well as early telecommunications experiments in the 1970s and 1980s.

The following description concentrates less on media-oriented or technical conceptions of interactivity than on those projects conducted from the 1960s onward that highlighted the idea of social, gregarious interaction. After a brief outline of various models of interactivity in media art, therefore, my essay will focus on communication projects and processes in whose course specific forms of interaction and concepts of interactivity developed. All the projects involved media- or computer-mediated human-to-human interaction aiming at the interconnection and cooperation of participants separated by vast physical distances. Today, the presented forms of art and interaction–from the