7.17 Mail Art | ScienceGate

In the formative years of the Internet, researchers collaboratively connected computing systems with a goal of sharing research and computing resources. The model process with which they created the Internet and its forefather, the ARPANET, was echoed in early social media platforms, where creative computer scientists, artists, writers, musicians educators explored the promise of computer-based platforms to bring together communities of interest in what would be called “cyberspace.” With a focus on the arts and humanities, this introduction traces the development of social media affordances in applications such as email, mailing lists, BBSs, the Community Memory, PLATO, Usenet, mail art, telematic art, and video communication. The author outlines the early social media platforms documented in each chapter in this book and summarizes how the book's epilogues both explore differences between early and contemporary social media and look to the future of the arts in social media.

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Mail Art, Tape Technology, and the Network

Assimilate ◽

10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199832583.003.0008 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 110-124

Author(s):

S. Alexander Reed

Keyword(s):

Mail Art

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Collecting collections: The Research Centre for Artists’ Publications

Art Libraries Journal ◽

10.1017/s0307472200018654 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 38 (3) ◽

pp. 30-35

Author(s):

Anne Thurmann-Jajes

Keyword(s):

Modern Art ◽

Research Centre ◽

Museum Of Modern Art ◽

Mail Art ◽

Special Collections ◽

Small Press

Established in 1999 within the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, in Bremen, the Studienzentrum für Künstlerpublikationen (Research Centre for Artists’ Publications) is today one of the most significant institutions worldwide in the field of artists’ publications, with holdings of more than 200,000 items, and important programmes of exhibitions and publications. The Research Centre traces its roots to the Archive for Small Press & Communication (ASPC), founded in 1974 by Anne Marsily and Guy Schraenen, and incorporates more than 40 individual archives and special collections, including the PLG Friesländer’s Mail Art Archive, the Klaus Groh Collection and the Kunstradio Archive.

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International Indeterminacy: George Maciunas and the Mail

ARTMargins ◽

10.1162/artm_a_00218 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 7 (3) ◽

pp. 57-85 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Colby Chamberlain

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Attorney General ◽

Conceptual Art ◽

New York State ◽

John Cage ◽

Power Structures ◽

Mail Art ◽

Art Object ◽

Curatorial Practice ◽

History Of

The term “network” has often been used to characterize Fluxus's internationalism and to identify its membership. This has led a number of scholars to argue that Fluxus anticipated forms of artistic exchange now associated with Internet-based art. More recently, it has cast Fluxus as a precedent for applying a network model to other transcontinental avant-gardes, particularly in curatorial practice. Yet in the rush to relate Fluxus to contemporary discourses on global connectivity, insufficient attention has been paid to the specific apparatuses that facilitated its cohesion. This article stages an intervention into Fluxus studies (and by extension Conceptual art, mail art, and other transnational movements associated with communication and the “dematerialization” of the art object) by drawing on the field of German media theory to analyze the “paperwork” that makes up much of the movement's material production. Specifically, it focuses on how the artist George Maciunas's engaged the postal system in order to facilitate Fluxus's collectivity, as well to insinuate Fluxus's methods of experimental composition into larger power structures. After an opening discussion of Maciunas's important diagrammatic history of Fluxus's development (a.k.a. the John Cage chart), the article tracks Maciunas's deployment of newsletters to organize Fluxus activities, his infamous mail-based sabotage proposals, his collaborations with Mieko Shiomi and Ben Vautier, and his “Flux Combat” with the New York State Attorney General.

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