SITO (artist collective)

Another focus of SITO that soon developed was an active interest in art games and experimentation with collaborative art projects using the Internet as a means of communicating. The first few such projects dabbled in dividing digital canvases amongst several artists (e.g. Grid and Crosswire projects) or translating traditional art games such as exquisite corpse to the digital medium. These projects were in full swing by 1994 and were grouped together under the heading Synergy on SITO. In 1996, the SITO Synergy project HyGrid was honored with a Prix Ars Electronica award. HyGrid is a twisting, looping, multi-dimensional maze of small panels of art which is built up by hundreds of artists. It is still active today. Gridcosm started in 1997 and proved even more popular with over 22000 contributions to its recursing collaborative collage and continues to grow daily. ==OTIS vs. SITO==

SITO originally was announced as "The OTIS Project", with a subtitle of "The Operative Term is Stimulate", which is where the acronym OTIS came from. This mostly whimsical choice became the name of the project and, in mid-1995, became an unexpected problem. An art college in the United States named Otis was troubled by the fact that OTIS made use of the term "OTIS Gallery" and used the domain otis.org. They sent a cease-and-desist letter and various other threats. The collective discussed the situation and decided something so whimsical was hardly worth fussing over and elected to simply reverse the acronym, thus becoming SITO. ==See also==