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)

WorldCat

PDF (147 MB)

Bit International, 5-6: The Word Image (1969) [CR-SR/int.]

An issue of the magazine of Zagreb-based New Tendencies network, dedicated to concrete poetry. Six other issues were produced between 1968-72.

Contents:
Vera Horvat-Pintarić, “The Word Image”
Branimir Donat, “Poésie concrete – cosmogonie-poetique de l’ere technologique”
Max Bense, “Konkrete Poesie”
Tomaž Brejc, “La compagnie OHO et la poésie topographique en Slovénie”
Siegfried J. Schmidt, “Computopoeme”
Željko Bujas, “First Croatian Literary Texts Computer-Processed”
Information bulletin about Tendencies 4 exhibition

Edited by Vera Horvat-Pintarić, et al.
Publisher Zagreb City Gallery, 1969
145 pages
via MAMA Zagreb

PDF (13 MB)

J. R. Pierce: Portrait of the Machine as a Young Artist (1965)

“Mechanistic muses are expanding their domain to encompass every facet of creative activity.”

In this article published in the June 1965 issue of Playboy, Bell Labs engineer, communications satellite pioneer and science fiction writer John R. Pierce introduces the work done in computer music, literature, film, and visual art, and issues an invitation to artists to explore and “school” the computer to yield new paths.

Published in Playboy 12(6), 1965, pp 124-5 & 150 & 182 & 184
via Forum on the Genealogy of MediaThinking (the website contains many scans of essays on media theory and archaeology)

PDF (14 MB)

See also:
Grace Glueck’s criticism of computer art, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Computer, New York Times, 1983.
More writings by Pierce.