Paper presented at the conference CAT 2010 3 February 2010, London; published in the procedings book Cat 2010: Ideas Before Their Time: Connecting the Past and Present in Computer Art.

It discusses early work that predated Internet Art and that was concerned with active audience participation in electronic art and describes the path of development of the first author’s artworks that have looked at human to human communication through electronic (computer) systems from 1970 until today. The fundamental concept has been to make artworks that explore human communication through conversations using restricted languages. The initial inspiration was a set of studies of early infant language development. By 1990 Edmonds showed much more elaborate work using computer-based local area networks.