"One Hell of a Strange, Highly Explosive Mixture": Art, New Wave, and Digital Culture in 1980s North Rhine-Westphalia

In the early 1980s, the Düsseldorf new wave embraced a do-it-yourself ethos of art making that celebrated amateurism, experimentation, and collaboration. Many of the same creators also engaged with new media and digital technologies in order to tap into the microcomputer's potential as a grassroots communication tool beyond military or corporate contexts. These projects exposed non-specialists to the potential for digital technology to enhance communication in daily life, while setting the stage for more wide-reaching digital art and activism in the 1990s.