This website documents the research project “Van Gogh TV. Erschließung, Multimedia-Dokumentation und Analyse ihres Nachlasses”, which was carried out from 2018 to 2021.
Van Gogh TV was a collective of hackers and artists who, with their “Piazza virtuale” project at documenta 1992, created a precursor to the interaction and collaboration that characterises the internet today.

This website contains excerpts from the programme of “Piazza virtuale”, interviews with those involved, documents, sources, texts and other materials that we found during our research or created ourselves.

The project is a cooperation between the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (Prof. Dr. Jens Schroeter and PD Dr. Christoph Ernst) and the Institute for Media Design at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz (Prof. Anja Stöffler and Prof. Dr. Tilman Baumgärtel) and was funded by the German Research Foundation.

The english-language book “Van Gogh TV’s »Piazza Virtuale«. The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992”, the first study of this ground-breaking project, is now available in Germany and soon internationally.  An Open Access version of the book as a PDF is available here.

In November 2021 the exhibition “Van Gogh TVs Piazza virtuale” took place in Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Watch how the show was powered down for the last time in this video! A photo documentation of the exhibition is here.

As an addition to the show in physical space, there was a online version, that was created with common.garden and can still be visited online.