Quick Facts
Biography
Madeleine Altmann is a contemporary video artist. She was born in Brazil and lives in the United States.
Career
In San Francisco, Altmann produced 52 live MVTV shows through PEG-TV. In 1991 she moved to Prague, The Czech Republic to produce a show for NTV called Tady a Ted ("Here and Now"), a bilingual show in English and Czech showcasing life in Prague after the Velvet Revolution.
Returning to San Francisco, Altmann and Michael Freeman created Erotica SF, a magazine-style show on leased access cable television. Viacom ended the show in 1993, whereupon Altmann sued along with the help of the ACLU to restore the show's production.
In 1994 Altmann was invited by Nick West, professor at New York University, to join his program to develop content for YORB. She also began Babes4U, an operation which enabled women who previously worked in strip clubs to go to private offices run by women in order to transmit their images to other computers, a first for that time. Babes4U also developed one of the first micro-payment systems that enabled pay-per-use processing via credit cards.
Altmann worked as PEG-TV's director for seven years.