Annmarie Chandler, Norie Neumark (eds.): At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet (2005)

“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.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262033283, 9780262033282
xiv+486 pages

Reviews: Publishers Weekly (2005), Vincent Bonin (2005), Graham Meikle (Scan, 2006), Paolo Gerbaudo (Culture Machine, 2006), Joel Slayton (Art Book, 2006), Karrie Karahalios (New Media & Society, 2006), Jennifer Way (RCCS, 2008, with responses from editors).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (updated on 2019-11-22)

Makeworlds papers 1-4 (2001-2004)

make world is a unix command used to completely update an operating system. It’s designed to follow the latest developments once the local sources are synchronized. Typing “make world” in the command line rebuilds and renews the whole system while it’s running. The first make-world festival took place from October 18th to the 21nd, 2001 in Munich. Against the backdrop of one of the fastest growing High Tech and New Media clusters in the world, scientists, theorists, artists and activists were invited to participate in presentations, constructive conversations, reflection and debates. It was an opportunity to link up different approaches while keeping and challenging their diversity, contextuality and self reference.
Under the title BORDER=”0″ LOCATION=”YES” the make world paper#1 aimed to track new forms of subjectivity carried out by current modifications of the world; which until recently were characterized as “infotization”, “digitization” and “globalization”. The more these buzzwords loose their glamour, the more important it is to discuss the role borders play, and question what restricted and unrestricted locality, mobility and freedom of movement may mean.

Compiled and edited by Geert Lovink, Sebastian Luetgert, Joanne Richardson, Pit Schultz, Florian Schneider, Soenke Zehlke
32 pages

PDF (updated on 2013-8-10)

One year after the make-world conference, paper#2 has been released at the occasion of the European Social Forum in Florence in the beginning of November 2002.

Compiled and edited by Arianna Bove, Erik Empson, Susanne Lang, Geert Lovink, Florian Schneider, Soenke Zehlke
32 pages

PDF (updated on 2013-8-10)

Make world paper3 has been published on 11 September 2003. It is the third edition of a free newspaper that is distributed in 5,000 copies. Paper3 is geared towards the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, in December 2003.

Edited by Arianna Bove, Erik Empson, Geert Lovink, Florian Schneider, Soenke Zehlke
16 pages

authors

PDF (updated on 2013-8-10)

Makeworlds paper#4 is a product of collaborative text filtering and appeared in a circulation of 10,000 hard copies on dead tree. It was produced as a collection of associated or complementary or auxiliary text material at the occasion of NEURO–networking europe, from February 26-29, 2004 in Munich (DE). But also beyond the actual event the paper will be valuable as a entry point to the various debates, presentations, workshops and audio-visual productions during and around the festival.

Edited by Arianna Bove, Annett Busch, Erik Empson, Susanna Lang, Geert Lovink, Sebastian Luetgert, Florian Schneider, Mathias Wrba, Soenke Zehlke
Publisher Multitude, Bernau b. Berlin
32 pages

authors

PDF (updated on 2013-8-10)