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)

Hito Steyerl: Circulacionismo. Circulationism (2014) [English/Spanish]

“Using video installations and reflection in essays, Hito Steyerl presents a critical apparatus for analyzing the way in which the images produced by television, cinema and contemporary art are inscribed in a visual and economic regime. These are produced, circulated, distributed and consumed in a framework of audiovisual capitalism and form part of different institutional mechanisms of the art world, including the museum. From this perspective, the images are converted into a vehicle of social relations with an ambivalent status insofar as they are both commodity and means of political statement. A second problem raised by the artist is the truth condition of images. Her work repeatedly makes use of appropriated or poor-quality images, together with documentary-type elements, with the aim of questioning the relationship between documentary, reality and representation.”

This book contains Steyerl’s essays “Too much world: Is the Internet dead?” and “Theodore W. Adorno. Timeline”, and the essay “Weather for Liquidity” by Brian Kuan Wood.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Hito Steyerl: Circulationism held from 27 September 2014 – 1 March 2015 at MUAC in Mexico City which brought together three of her recent works: Adorno’s Grey (2012), Museum as Battlefield (2012) and Liquidity Inc. (2014).

Publisher Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City, 2014
Folio MUAC series, 23
ISBN 6070257545, 9786070257544
71 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (2 MB)

Paul Soulellis (ed.): Printed Web (2014–)

“Printed Web is a semi-annual print-on-demand publication of web-to-print art and discourse. Inspired by Seth Siegelaub’s group show publications, each issue contains new work by artists who work on, within and around the Internet.”

With contributions from Hito Steyerl, Joachim Schmid, Penelope Umbrico, Christian Bök, Clement Valla, Kenneth Goldsmith, David Horvitz, Chris Alexander, Mishka Henner, Benjamin Shaykin (1), Constant Dullaart, Daniel Temkin, James Bridle, John Zissovici, Cheryl Sourkes, Brian Droitcour, Tan Lin, Angela Genusa, Webdriver Torso, Rafaël Rozendaal, Olia Lialina, Cory Arcangel (2), Alexander Galloway, Silvio Lorusso (3), and many others.

Issue 1
Publisher Library of the Printed Web, Winter 2014
ISBN 9780984005222
64 pages

Issue 2
Publisher Library of the Printed Web, Fall 2014
ISBN 9780984005246
180 pages

Issue 3
Publisher Library of the Printed Web, Spring 2015
ISBN 9781320767903
388 pages + 10 zines x 24 pages

Publisher

No. 1 (6 MB)
No. 2 (14 MB)
No. 3, FTP (147 folders, 329 files)
No. 3: Ten Zines (ZIP), PDFs