The Story
14,000 miles across America, documented in real time using digital cameras and a laptop. Images relayed live to a server in Hull. Artists back home reinterpreted the raw material digitally and posted their work back to the website. Collaborative digital storytelling — in 1998.
Before GPS. Before smartphones. Before anyone had heard of a blog. A photographer, a digital camera, a laptop, and a dial-up connection hit the road from New York City and didn’t stop until they reached the Pacific Ocean.
On The Road was Cafe Society’s first major project beyond Hull — and it was radical in ways that are easy to underestimate from a 2026 perspective. In 1998, the idea of documenting a journey in real time and sharing it live with an audience on the other side of the world was genuinely new. There was no template for it. No platform. No manual. Just an idea, a server in Hull, and a very long road.
The Remote Viewer concept
The journey wasn’t just a road trip with a camera. It was a collaborative artwork built across two continents simultaneously.
As images were captured on the road — Monument Valley at dawn, the Nevada desert at dusk, the sprawl of Los Angeles, the coast at Big Sur — they were relayed live to a server in Hull. There, a network of invited artists — in Hull, Amsterdam, and beyond — received the raw image data, reinterpreted and manipulated it digitally, and posted their newly constructed work back to the Cafe Society website.
The concept was called the Remote Viewer. The photographer on the road generated the source material. The network transformed it into something else entirely. Two creative processes — one physical, one digital — running simultaneously across the Atlantic, producing work that neither could have made alone.
Live conversation, live debate
The Cafe Society website wasn’t just a gallery. It had live chat rooms built into it — spaces where the remote viewers and web visitors could come together in real time to discuss the work as it emerged.
In 1998 this was extraordinary. The idea that an artwork could be discussed by its audience as it was being made — while the photographer was still on the road, while the remote viewers were still reinterpreting the images — was genuinely new territory. Community, curation, and conversation built into the architecture of the project from day one.
The route
The journey covered 14,000 miles across the continental United States — from New York City through the Appalachians, across the Great Plains, into the desert Southwest, through Monument Valley and the Navajo Nation, across California, and finally to San Francisco.
The Navajo Nation section of the journey would prove to be more than just a road trip stop. The landscapes, the communities, the visual language of the reservation — all of it stayed with the project. Four years later, Cafe Society would return to the Southwest for REZ02 — a dedicated residency working directly with Navajo communities in Arizona.
What it meant
On The Road was proof of concept for everything Cafe Society believed about digital storytelling. That geography was no longer a barrier to creative collaboration. That communities separated by thousands of miles could make work together in real time. That the internet wasn’t just a distribution channel — it was a creative medium in its own right.
Those ideas — radical in 1998 — are entirely mainstream now. Cafe Society was working with them before most people had a broadband connection.
The experience of crossing America and collaborating with communities on the road laid the foundations for even more ambitious international workshops, including the Arizona — Navajo Workshops project that followed a few years later.
When Digital Schools was founded a decade later, the instinct was identical. The technology had changed beyond recognition. The belief hadn’t moved an inch — that giving communities the tools to tell their story well is always worth doing, wherever in the world they are.
Photography: Jon Robson. c1998.
