Wolfgang Staehle
1950–
Wolfgang Staehle is a media artist and the founder and executive director of THE THING, an independent media project and one of the seminal on-line and off-line forums for net art. THE THING began as a Bulletin Board System focusing on contemporary art and cultural theory in 1991 and moved its wares onto the Web in 1995.
Staehle was born in Stuttgart, Germany, and has been living in New York since 1976. He is widely recognized as a pioneer of the Internet art scene, and his video and new media works have been exhibited world-wide. His work Empire 24/7—a live image of the Empire State Building in New York—was included in the net_condition show at ZKM Center in Karlsruhe (1999) and in Loans from the Invisible Museum at Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco (2000). He had solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, (1993) and Marimura Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (1990). His exhibition 2001 (Postmasters Gallery, September 2001) consists of three Web-transmissions—the television tower in Berlin, the Comburg monastery, and a panoramic view of lower Manhattan—offering an instantaneous compression of time and space.
Introduction
Wolfgang Staehle (born 1950) is an early pioneer of net.art in the United States, known for his video streaming of the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City during the September 11 attacks. He also captured the crash of the first plane into the World Trade Center.
Wikidata identifier
Q1232132
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed March 12, 2025.
Roles
Artist, video artist
ULAN identifier
500083397
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed March 12, 2025.
Exhibitions & projects
artport
See more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.