Discover the Lost Early Computer Art from the 1970s
Before GIFs and net art, there was Telidon. Telidon was a protocol invented in Canada in the late 1970s that let people dial in to central servers over the phone lines to view computer graphics on their TV sets. Telidon was mainly meant for online shopping and banking, but it wasn’t all business. Artists in Toronto obtained one of the desk-sized computers used to create Telidon graphics and formed a thriving community around it before Telidon disappeared in the mid 80s. We catch up with the original Telidon artists and find out what it was like to be a true pioneer in the world of art made with machines.
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"It is no exaggeration to say that the telecommunications marketplace in Canada was gripped by Telidon fever from late 1979 to late 1982," writes Donald Gilles in the Canadian Journal of Communications.
"Art is a turn and a turn."
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