At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Leonardo, 2005. Cloth, xiv, 486 pages, illustrations; 24 cm. Near fine. Firm binding, clean inside copy. Remainder mark/top edge. Dust jacket protected in a mylar book cover. "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. CONTENTS: Interactive, algorithmic, networked: aesthetics of new media art, by Johanna Drucker; Immaterial material: physicality, corporality, and dematerialization in telecommunication artworks, by Tilman Baumga¨rtel; From representation to networks: interplays of visualities, apparatuses, discourses, territories and bodies, by Reinhard Braun; The mail art exhibition: personal worlds to cultural strategies, by John Held, Jr.; Fluxus praxis: an exploration of connections, creativity, and community, by Owen F. Smith; Animating the social: mobile image/Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, by Annmarie Chandler; An unsuspected future in broadcasting: negativland, by Don Joyce; Mini-FM: performing microscopic distance (an e-mail interview with Tetsuo Kogawa), by Tetsuo Kogawa with Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark; From the Gulf War to the Battle of Seattle: building an international alternative media network, by Jesse Drew; The form: 1970-1979 and other extemporaneous anomalous assemblings, by Melody Sumner Carnahan; Networked psychoanalysis: a dialogue with Anna Freud Banana, by Craig Saper; From mail art to telepresence: communication at a distance in the works of Paulo Bruscky and Eduardo Kac, by Simone Osthoff; Distance makes the art grow further: distributed authorship and telematic textuality in La plissure du texte, by Roy Ascott; From BBS to wireless: a story of art in chips, by Andrew Garton; REALTIME: radio art, telematic art, and telerobotics: two examples, by Heidi Grundmann; Estri-dentistas: taking the teeth out of futurism, by Maria Fernandez; Computer network music bands: a history of the league of automatic music composers and the hub, by Chris Brown and John Bischoff; Assembling magazines and alternative artists' networks, by Stephen Perkins; The wealth and poverty of networks, by Ken Friedman; From internationalism to transnations: networked art and activism, by Sean Cubitt.. 1st. Hardcover. Very Good/Fine. 8vo.