Dial Up to Utopia (An Oral History of the Early Internet)

Dial Up to Utopia: An Oral History of the Early Internet shares the voices of the artists, critics, activists, and writers who were deeply engaged in the genesis and culture of the world's most powerful technology.

Through the stories and recollections of those who were present in the early, anarchic days of the internet, you will relive the unparalleled excitement of a technology that many believed would unite the world in utopian harmony, as well as the disillusionment of what eventually emerged: namely, today's culture of vanity and harassment, surveillance capitalism, and political and social repression.

With the utopian dream of the early internet almost unrecognizable to young people today, Dial Up to Utopia aims to convey the euphoria and sense of endless potential the online world once represented to so many, as well as offering a critically optimistic outlook of what might lie ahead.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Douglas Rushkoff: Named one of the "world's ten most influential intellectuals" by MIT, Rushkoff's books included Survival of the Richest, Program or Be Programmed, and Present Shock. He created the concepts of "viral media," "screenagers," and "social currency," and his PBS Frontline documentaries include Merchants of Cool and Generation Like

Jane Metcafe is the co-founder of Wired magazine

Bruce Sterling is an American author of science fiction who emerged as a proponent of the subgenre known as cyberpunk. Among his works are Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, an exposé of computer crime.

Julien Mailland is the co-founder of the Minitel Research Lab, USA. He is a Professor of Media Management, Law, and Policy at Indiana University.

Geert Lovinkis a Dutch media theorist and critic of digital culture. He is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, an Amsterdam-based research organization focused on internet studies and digital media.

Ricardo Dominguez was a founding member of Critical Art Ensemble, and a cofounder of Electronic Disturbance Theater, a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico. He teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego.

Ruth Catlow is an artist/researcher/curator, Co-Director of Furtherfield, and Co-PI at the Serpentine Galleries Blockchain Lab.

Mindy Seu is an American designer, researcher and technologist whose work focuses on public engagement with digital archives. She is best known for her Cyberfeminism Index project and publications and is currently on the faculty at UCLA's Design Media Arts Department.

Sabria David is co-founder of the Slow Media Institute. She has been on panels and talks like at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, the Frankfurt Bookfair and other international conferences.

Omar Kholeif is an award-winning and best-selling author, curator, cultural historian and broadcaster. Kholeif is Professor of Global Art Theory and Practice at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) Media outlets including, The New York Times, BBC, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, GQ, The Economist, The Art Newspaper, Vice, The New Scientist, among others, have profiled Kholeif and their work.

Enno Park was one of the leading voices advocating for liquid democracy in the German Pirate Party. Liquid democracy was the most profound experiment in online democracy, the first approach to make democratic anarchism reality.

Skawennati An early adopter of cyberspace, as both a location and a medium, Skawennati is renowned in internet circles for her Cyberpowwow project, one of the first major online art exhibitions. Her multimedia artwork has been presented internationally and collected by the National Gallery of Canada, Musée d'Art contemporain de Montreal, Toma Foundation, among others. She co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, a research creation network at Concordia University.

J.R. Carpenter got her PhD from the University of Arts, London. Her pioneering works have been exhibited, presented, and performed at museums, galleries, conferences and festivals around the world. Her essays, reviews, and writing on textile art, new media, and internet history have been published and broadcast in English, French, and have been translated into many other languages.

Virginia Barratt and Francesca da Rimini formed In Her Interior (IHI) to cocreate and perform live works of spoken/sung and recorded text and video within site-specific installation environments. As two of the four cofounders of the cyberfeminist group VNS Matrix (est. 1991), da Rimini and Barratt have contributed to global critiques of gender and technology across three decades.

Mendi Obadike and Keith Obadike are legendary for their early internet artwork, and for their early series of interventions, the Black.Net.Art Actions, which posed a counternarrative to the idea “that the internet would be a place free of racism and race itself.” Keith is a professor in the College of Arts and Communication at William Paterson University, while Mendi is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.

Jasmina Tešanović is a feminist and political activist known among other things, for her engagement in the international movement “Women in Black” during and in the aftermath of the Yugoslavian civil war, and the international feminist peace movement "Code Pink."