Reabracadabra, an animated Minitel piece by Eduardo Kac from 1985. It was recently restored and Rhizome is now showing it online in Net Art Anthologies. Accompanied by a text by Goto80.
Tag Archives: antiope
EDTA, a Minitel server
A teletext (Antiope) magazine for teenagers, available at 10 high schools in 1985. “The kind of information presented (topical subjects, sports scores, around town information, etc.), the way it was presented (short, tightly edited segments), and the format (contemporary, graphic-heavy, easy to access) were appropriate to a teenage audience.”
Antiope (1979) was a French competitor to teletext, which worked quite different from its main rival, the British Ceefax. Antiope’s protocol was more similar to telephony. So, according to the French, it was not as “crude and old fashioned” as Ceefax, which used a frame-based television logic.
In the top picture, you can see how large text characters could change colours even if they were right next to eachother. More importantly, you could change the character set by “down loading” them before the page was shown.
Eventually, the British would win the standardization war and proclaim World System Teletext.