From November 12 to 14, 1980, two life-size screens installed by the artists—one outside a department store in Los Angeles, another outside Lincoln Center in New York City—were connected via a live two-way transmission. This sudden, unannounced link allowed passersby in both locations to communicate in real time. A televisual portal between the East and West Coasts, Galloway and Rabinowitz’s “outrageous transcontinental pedestrian intersection” anticipated the contemporary use of video-conferencing applications and a more instantly networked world.
This installation reconstructs that event with footage capturing the reactions of audiences, who, in the artists’ words, were able to “see, hear, and speak with each other as if encountering each other on the same sidewalk” and to “preview the sociopolitical contexts of new ways of being-in-the-world.”
Gallery label from Signals: How Video Transformed the World, March 5–July 8, 2023
