At a distance : precursors to art and activism on the Internet

Review The book is an exhilarating, eye-opening read that restores the body to the virtual and pulls the virtual out of the digital and back into lived and produced social relations. (Patricia R. Zimmermann, Department of Cinema and Photography, Ithaca College)The book is an exhilarating, eye-opening read that restores the body to the virtual and pulls the virtual out of the digital and back into lived and produced social relations. (Patricia R. Zimmermann, Department of Cinema and Photography, Ithaca College) Product Description The theory and practice of networked art and activism, including mail art, sound art, telematic art, fax art, Fluxus, and assemblings.Networked collaborations of artists did not begin on the Internet. In this multidisciplinary look at the practice of art that takes place across a distance―geographical, temporal, or emotional―theorists and practitioners examine the ways that art, activism, and media fundamentally reconfigured each other in experimental networked projects of the 1970s and 1980s. By providing a context for this work―showing that it was shaped by varying mixes of social relations, cultural strategies, and political and aesthetic concerns― At a Distance effectively refutes the widely accepted idea that networked art is technologically determined. Doing so, it provides the historical grounding needed for a more complete understanding of today's practices of Internet art and activism and suggests the possibilities inherent in networked practice. At a Distance traces the history and theory of such experimental art projects as Mail Art, sound and radio art, telematic art, assemblings, and Fluxus. Although the projects differed, a conceptual questioning of the "art object," combined with a political undermining of dominant art institutional practices, animated most distance art. After a section that sets this work in historical and critical perspective, the book presents artists and others involved in this art "re-viewing" their work―including experiments in "mini-FM," telerobotics, networked psychoanalysis, and interactive book construction. Finally, the book recasts the history of networks from the perspectives of politics, aesthetics, economics, and cross-cultural analysis. From Publishers Weekly For those who want to argue that Internet-based work and collaborations are new kinds of art wholly determined by the Web's capabilities and codes, this edited collection offers a series of history lessons. Both editors are based at Sydney's University of Technology: Chandler is director of "emerging field" in new media and digital culture; Neumark is associate professor of media arts and production. The 20 pieces that they have collected here show, variously, how the politically engaged mail art, dematerializations, performances, broadcasts, happenings and other doings of the '60s through '80s (with an emphasis on the latter years) worked in the same networked fashion as Internet art-they just relied on slower and/or more familiar media, like the postal service, f-2-f contact or FM broadcasting. The best pieces here feature first-person accounts from the artists and collaborators themselves. Highlights include Jesse Drew's account of Deep Dish TV (a satellite-delivered alternative television network from the '80s) and Melody Summer Carnahan's story of The Form, a 1978 project that solicited one-line responses to each year of the 1970s (and predictions for '79) from a variety of artists and civilians. The rest can be high on jargon, but the spirit of play that pervades the work comes through regardless. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author Annmarie Chandler is Director of Emerging Field in New Media and Digital Culture at University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.Norie Neumark, a sound and media artist, is Honorary Professorial Fellow at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne