Artists in the early 1980s reacted strongly against the minimalist and conceptual artwork of the 1970s by producing a material stream of imagery in multiple media at once—painting, TV, video, music, and others. Although they were inspired by the legacy of the counterculture in the 1960s, the artists of the punk era were less idealistic, influenced by the depressed economy and high youth unemployment of their era. As noted in chapter 2, the art scene in the Netherlands between 1980 and 1984 was closely connected and locallyoriented, and the work they produced was characterized by collaborative practice. Although the neo-expressionism of the Nieuwe Wilden painters would later be celebrated as a return to painting, these artists fluidly moved between mediums and helped found pioneering new media art projects.

In the late ‘70s, new opportunities for media experimentation arose in Amsterdam. At the time, the municipal government was embarking on an ambitious plan to connect all the residencies in the city to a unified cable television network. Before the installation was halfway complete, young hackers devised ways to access the system. The first cable TV pirates broadcast hardcore pornography—a choice they thought would attract the most attention—which would appear late at night on the dead air after the channels ended regular programming for the day.