The Summer of 1995

The original Wrapped Reichstag Logo we used for the KULTURBOX in 1995

Today 15 years ago I was sitting in front of a computer just as I do now writing down my experience. The biggest difference is probably that today I am not be able to see the wrapped Reichstag just outside my window and working on the most accessed Internet project in 1995.

To understand what I am talking about, lets relocate to Berlin, Germany and move back in time even further, back to 1993.

As a kind of side project of my company Media-Link, me and a partner founded the KULTURBOX which originally was a BBS for artists and everybody involved in making art happen. The then new concept of KULTURBOX was to use technology to help artists and art-workers to exchange information and present themselves in digital form with the goal to help with the logistics of art.

In the next 2 years the KULTURBOX became very popular and so the logical step was to move from a closed BBS system to the Internet.

Easier said then done, because in early 1995 worldwide only about 10 million people had access to the Internet and Germany was very behind with only ca. 200,000 users, most of them scientists and students. We have to remember, in this time Yahoo was just a public bookmark collection and Google or any major search engine simply didn’t exist yet.

The Internet was not only hard to access for mere mortals back then, but it was even worse for content providers like the KULTURBOX. The few ISPs which existed charged bandwidth in- and outgoing. What this means is that every byte transmitted got charged and it was expensive…so there was hardly any advantage for content providers to become successful. The very idea of flat rates didn’t exist.

Regardless of this challenge, KULTURBOX just finished their biggest project so far, the very first presentation of Germans international movie festival Berlinale on the Internet. The project was a costly success and me and my partner looked for the next challenge. And what a challenge was waiting for us.

The famous artists Christo & Jeanne-Claude got the permission – after 24 years of trying – to wrap the German Reichstag in Berlin. This instantly stroke 2 chords with me, first I saw Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s Umbrella installation in California just 4 years earlier and second the Reichstag was the first building I was really fascinated with since the first time I’ve seen it.

After some research we got in contact with Wolfgang Volz, Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s photographer and project manager for the Wrapped Reichstag project and offered them to create an official web presentation especially made for them. This sounded more easy than it actually was, because until this time there was practically no real-life art project ever be presented on the web and so we had nothing to compare it to. Also Christo & Jeanne-Claude financed all their projects themselves and didn’t want to be associated with sponsors, companies and other commercial entities. Since KULTURBOX was just a free service managed by my partner and myself and financed only out of my own pocket as a side-project of my one-man company Media-Link, we became the top candidate for this project.

We had three reasons why we wanted to turn the Wrapped Reichstag into a web project and money was none of it. First we loved Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s project, second we saw the incredible opportunity to make the web more popular by showcasing an art project on the then mostly academic and scientific centric Internet and third we saw an incredible chance for Berlin to present themselves internationally.

After 2 months of negotiation, screening processes (“No, we are not backed by Microsoft!“) and discussions, Wolfgang Volz and Christo & Jeanne-Claude agreed to let KULTURBOX be the home of the official presentation of the Wrapped Reichstag. From several other commercial companies who approached Christo & Jeanne-Claude about this project, we had the most experience, where most connected to the art scene and had no hidden agenda. We also had a very simple argument why they should bother with an official site at all, because if there would be none, other sites will provide coverage outside the control of the Reichstag team.

Our agreement also was a simple one: We will be part of the team and move for the time of the project into the official Wrapped Reichstag office just next to the Reichstag, there will be no money involved on either sides and the Reichstag team will approve the information directly related to the project before it will be published. We were also allowed to find sponsors for the KULTURBOX itself, but not associate them in any way with Christo & Jeanne-Claude.

The moment we got the project my partner and I got busy…we had no own web server yet, no ISP who would be able to withstand the expected traffic and we had only 2 months left before the Reichstag was about to be wrapped.

The first thing I did was to post a message to the German newsgroups and looked for volunteers for this project. I also asked about everybody I know and after a short time, we got a team of 32 people together…some of them could program, some wanted to learn HTML and get some experience with this new Internet thing.

The next 2 months are just a blur in my memory, at daytime me and my partner met cultural institutions, independent artists, dance groups, galleries and just about everybody who was involved in the Berlin based art- and culture scene and explained what the Internet is. We left these meetings with print-outs, photos, CD’s or floppy disks (Remember, it was 1995!) and the most exotic file formats on earth. At night we converted, scanned and typed in text and turned everything into a huge HTML presentation.

Because this project took all my time, I passed on jobs for Media-Link to other companies and shut down most of the operations, so that I could concentrate on the Wrapped Reichstag project alone.

Thanks to support from the DFN, the German national research and education network and the Technical University Berlin, our Internet needs were covered and Sun sponsored a Spark 5 as our web server, which we connected directly to Germans biggest Internet backbone with a whopping 2Mbps bandwidth.

There was no time to sleep and I was probably not the best smelling person in the world because I hardly ever made it home, but this dedication lead to an incredible big project. We managed to get an entire Berlin based city information project including live calendar, a city map, presentation of more than 200 Berlin based culture projects, a book project about the history of the Reichstag and much, much more online. We also managed to be practically 100% bilingual because it made little sense to offer all the information only in German.

And of course the heart of the project was the official presentation of Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Reichstag with live coverage via web journal from inside the project office, photos taken by the project team and myself, a live camera, background information, interviews with the artists and etc. etc. The project was huge!

Video still from our live cam covering the entire duration of the Wrapping of the Reichstag in 1995 – click for the movie!

On June 17th, the official opening of the Wrapped Reichstag our service launched and instantly became a hit. Since we were part of the project team, we permanently got new information and updated the site practically around the clock. The press coverage the KULTURBOX received was only dwarfed by the coverage Christo & Jeanne-Claude received, it was incredible.

Berlin in 1995 was a troubled town, but the 6 million visitors who came to visit the Wrapped Reichstag in person created such a relaxed, peaceful party atmosphere, it was probably the best time to be in Berlin ever.

Life in the office was also fun, all day long some VIPs asked for an audience with Christo & Jeanne-Claude, but they were so fantastically unimpressed by most of them and had no problems to turn them away. I remember vividly as Arnold Schwarzenegger and 6 bodyguards arrived and Jeanne-Claude in her typical refreshing way said “Arnold who? A Terminator? We don’t want to meet a Terminator, send him away!“. This all happened practically in front of Schwarzenegger, whose face changed to red and he left in an instant.

But also for the KULTURBOX not everything was so happy, because our server was so popular, we totally saturated the 2 Mbps backbone and most of the universities and science institutes connected to the same backbone had trouble to send emails or use the Internet for their purposes. We learned that students and scientists can curse like pirates.

I don’t remember how many things we pioneered in this project…the first blog ever? Check. The first bilingual web presentation of a huge art project? Check. The first city map service? Check. We were first in so many things and thanks to the KULTURBOX the term “Internet” became the first time popular in Germany.

Short before the end of the project, Wolfgang Volz came into the office and ask my partner and me if we like to go up on the then Wrapped Reichstag. Without hesitation I grabbed my camera, a helmet and up we went. The Wrapped Reichstag was fascinating from the outside, but from the inside even more so.

Because the German government planned to start construction to turn the Reichstag into the official German government building, the Reichstag was basically just an empty shell revealing unintentionally more history than expected…inside the Reichstag we found graffiti and drawings left by Russian soldiers as they took over Berlin in 1945. Most of it, especially the pornographic parts were later covered again and wait for another discovery whenever the Reichstag gets renovated sometimes in the far future.

The atmosphere inside the Reichstag and the light shining through the wrapping material was incredible, but this was nothing compared to the look from the roof. For almost 2 hours only my KULTURBOX partner and I were alone on the top of the Reichstag in a surreal wrapped world. Half of the time we just wandered around, the other time we sat on the side, 50 meter high, looking down to the masses assembled below on the grass and it was one of the most happy moments of my life. At one stage I realized that I just crashed my company Media-Link and spent just about every penny I had – a 6 digit number – on this project. But nothing like this mattered, I was happy and would have done it again the very next day. My Partner thought so too. 15 years later its kinda hard to describe the exact feeling I had at this time, but it was just pure happiness and the moment changed my life permanently.

After 2 weeks the Wrapped Reichstag project was over and we also shut down many of our services like the live web cam, the blog and other things and turned it all into an archive.

We moved out of the project office and said goodbye and thanks to Christo & Jeanne-Claude and most of the project team and the first time in weeks I went home and slept straight through for 24 hours.

After all was done, the KULTURBOX, my partner, the team and I had our 15 minutes (which turned actually into several years) of fame. Because nobody did what we did before with this Internet thing and there was so much demand for our knowledge, we founded the KULTURBOX GmbH, an Internet consulting company with clients like the German Government, the city of Berlin, Microsoft, the Central and Regional Library Berlin and hundreds of more clients. We also didn’t stop here, but 11 years before Google Map we turned our little Berlin based city map into a German wide map service and created other innovative web services.

While the time was exciting, I became incredible tired of the German naysayer mentality and how pioneers get treated, so I announced to my team that I decided to leave Germany permanently and start over in a different country. My partner was rather shocked and decided not to continue the KULTURBOX without me, so we sold off all the projects and shut down the KULTURBOX for good. Today I am happy that I had the idea to donate what was left of the original Wrapped Reichstag presentation to the Central and Regional Library Berlin, which kept the memory of the KULTURBOX and the Wrapped Reichstag alive.

Last year Jeanne-Claude passed away, but Christo continues to create art and I am incredible thankful to both of them for the experience to have worked together in the Summer of 1995.