Van Gogh TV's »Piazza Virtuale«: The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992

»Piazza virtuale« by the artist group Van Gogh TV was not only the biggest art project on television ever - from a contemporary point of view the project was also a forerunner of today's social media. The ground-breaking television event that took place during the 100 days of documenta 9 in 1992 was an early experiment with entirely user-created content. This is the first book-length study of a largely forgotten experiment: It not only documents its radicality of the approach, novel programme ideas and technical innovations. It also allows direct access to videos from the show, which were inaccessible until now, via QR codes.