Barbara Aselmeier, Joachim Blank, 
Armin Haase, Karl Heinz Jeron 

H A N D S H A K E
Kronenstr.3 - 10117 Berlin - 
Fax 049 - 30-229 24 29 Voice: 049 - 30 - 2 29 78 34
E-MAIL :luxlogis@contrib.de - WWW : http://www.is.in-berlin.de/g-
Art/LuxLogis/luxlogis_hall.html



Definition handshake: "a connection-oriented protocol 
exchanges control information with the remote system to 
verify that it is ready to receive data before sending it. 
When the handshaking is successfull, the systems are 
said to have established a connection."



HANDSHAKE is a communication project including the 
electronic network Internet. Realized as an interactive room 
installation, it intends to be a communication interface between 
electronic net and life-world. The set of intersection between 
electronic and real space forms the space of communication, 
where HANDSHAKE takes place. 
Interested visitors, artists, media theorists and practical 
workers, are invited to enhance the growing space of 
information: The emerging process of interplay with the
underlying information-pool will be called up over the global 
network connections as well as, in their current forms, from the 
installation. Prepared communications and perceptual 
experiments, on a word or image basis, will refer to the cultural 
characteristics of the participants.

Associations

Conducting association experiments within the network and in actions,
e.g. by analogy with the Rorschach test, HANDSHAKE will present
impressions of characteristic cultural features.
The experiment aims at indicating cultural differences, codes and
differing results in perceiving images.
Interested persons may take part by manipulating the graphic 
files with the images to be worked on in such a way that it becomes clear 
what has been associated with them.
Everybodey takes part in the process of communicating, as a communicator,
a receiver or a (systematic) observer.
We owe the fact that mutual understanding is possible - although there are
difficulties - to the human capacity of making communicative action itself
the subject of communication.
An operative strategy to explore social reality draws a conclusion line 
from the features of a non-manifest context.
And that's art.
Handshake is not to be seen as a finished work of art - it's rather a 
continuous process that intends to observe the behaviour of humans
and automats in an electronic network, where we partly make use of scientific
methods, e.g. from the social-psychological or scientific communication area.
However, it's not the empiric evaluation but curiosity to do interaction
(experiments) with other data travellers, what is the foreground.
This won't lead to developping software, but to a discourse on basic
conditions of communicative action, and thus to the artistic exploration of
communication processes within the electronic network. We move through 
the space of the internet, while, at the same time, taking an interest in the 
exploration, shaping and expansion of this exponentially growing mass medium.
The results of the different Handshake-actions may be seen at any time
and anywhere via internet. HANDSHAKE uses the following
internet services: Email, Newsgroups, Ftp, IRC, World Wide
Web; leaving a trace in the matrix of the world of networks.
A trace as a hypermedia archive, containing documents on the interaction 
between HANDSHAKE and the colaborators.


HANDSHAKE Berlin 10.10.94