Electronic Cafe International

ECI created the world's first cybercafe network in 1984. This was a concept of telecollaboration artists Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz who were commissioned as part of the L.A. Olympics Arts Festival by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. The Electronic Cafe was maintained for seven weeks. Even then the focus was broader than a simple c... ommunity-based point of access to technology. For the last decade, ECI has been using technology to explore co-creation and collaboration in real-time networked environments. The prerequisites for this are: 1) employing a multitude of disciplines, 2) using the performing arts as modes of investigating these new ways of being in the world and 3) creating a new context so that new forms and content can emerge. At the current Electronic Cafe "International" Headquarters in Santa Monica, California, computer and other industry professionals, educators, students, world-class artists, children, and the general public get to be the architects of their own visions of a new world of telecollaborative possibilities. They participate in and model the essentials for an information and telecommunications environment that is both functional and inclusive.Read More