The Art World and the World Wide Web

What?

Yeah, we registered the “@” symbol for “general entertainment purposes,” and the U.S. patent office gave us a certificate for this.

They obviously rescinded this later.

Amazing. So how long was @Café in business?

It lasted for three years before I shut it down—we just weren’t making money. We had not stuck to our initial vision of what we were selling. It was an amazing time. Unfortunately, it was not a Hard Rock.

So you were out of a job?

Yes, but literally the day after I locked up the café, I got a call from the gallery where I had interned. They were moving from SoHo to Chelsea and needed help installing their computer network.

So you were helping out some of the earliest Chelsea art-gallery pioneers?

Yes. I told them, “Well, I don’t really do that kind of work.”

But after the café, I had some expertise in technology and networks.

So you set up the new network for this gallery.

Yes, I was able to step in during the build-out of the space, which was huge. I moved them off the coaxial, ring-based networking model and had the construction crew install an Ethernet network. I transitioned them away from their old Novell server, put in a much less expensive Windows server, and added new workstations.

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