Wolfgang Staehle

Wolfgang Staehle 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 on September 11, 2001. He also captured the crash of the first plane into the World Trade Center.

Wolfgang Staehle was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1950, and studied at the Freie Kunstschule Stuttgart. In 1976, he moved to New York and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts.

After getting his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, he worked as a video artist, and in 1991, he founded The Thing. The Thing was an Internet forum for new media art. It started out as an independent media project that began as a bulletin board system (BBS) that later became an online forum for artists and cultural theorists to exchange ideas. By the late 1990s, The Thing grew into a successful online community and began hosting artists' websites. It also includes a mailing list and was the first Website devoted to net.art, bbs.thing.net.

In 1996, he started his series of live online video streams. His first series is called Empire 24/7 where he documented the Empire State Building in New York City. He documented it by setting up a digital still camera at The Thing’s office located in New York’s West Chelsea neighborhood. Every four seconds, the camera took a picture of the building and the images were sent and projected in a gallery at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. This project was a reference to Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire which was a silent, eight-hour-long black-and-white film in which the camera focused on the Empire State Building from dusk until dawn.

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