Chuck Welch (ed.): Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology (1995)

“This book is the first university press publication in academia to explore the historical roots, aesthetics and new directions in mail art. The essays of Eternal Network were written and assembled during the early 1990s by mail artist, writer, and curator, Chuck Welch. The edition contains forty illustrated chapters surveying an international community whose mailboxes and computers were a proto internet bridging the analog and digital world of art and communication. Eternal Network includes numerous photographs of mailed artifacts, performance events, congresses, stampsheets, posters, collages, artists’ books, visual poetry, computer art, mail art projects, zines, copy art and rubber-stamped images.

The book is divided into six parts: Networking Origins, Open Aesthetics, New Directions, Interconnection of Worlds, Communication Issues and Ethereal Realms. Appendixes include mailing addresses from the 1990s, mail art exhibitions, a listing and location of over 350 underground mail art magazines and a comprehensive record of public and private international mail art archives. The late Judith Hoffberg, founder of Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) and editor of Umbrella Magazine, wrote an astute and prophetic review of Eternal Network in March 1995. “Some might think that this is the last gasp of a paper-orientated group of artists, but it is more a testament to the future of alternative art and the role of artists as networker”.”

With a Foreword by Ken Friedman
Publisher University of Calgary Press, Calgary, 1995
ISBN 1895176271, 9781895176278
xxiii+304 pages
via Chuck Welch, (2)

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PhotoStatic, Retrofuturism, Psrf (1983-1998)

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PhotoStatic was a magazine, a periodical series of printed works that focused on xerography as the source of a particular visual language that was widely used by graphic artists in the various art and music underground scenes of the 1980s and 1990s. During this time, the publication served as a forum to collect and redistribute artworks that originated in these scenes. Eventually, its scope extended to embrace not only graphic works, but also concrete poetry, correspondence art, ephemera from works in other media, essays, fiction, reviews, and reports on various cultural scenes, including Neoism, the home taping community, the zine community, and mail art.

Founded by editor Lloyd Dunn in 1983, the magazine continued in some form until as late as 1998. It inevitably underwent several transformations; for example, in 1987, to reflect changing interests, the zine was renamed Retrofuturism, and became closely associated with the intermedia group The Tape-beatles. At the end of 1989, at the height of its circulation, the title ceased publication in observance of the Neoist Art Strike 1990-1993. (Dunn also went abroad to live for a time shortly after this.)

After re-emerging in the mid-nineties as Psrf (letters chosen to reflect both earlier titles), the project was not again able to find traction. The internet boom was well underway, and so it seemed that the cultural moment for this type of publication had simply passed on.

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