Customer Reviews

At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet (Leonardo Book Series)

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At a Distance makes a convincing case for an analog prehistory of the Internet. Read this book and discover a genealogy for today's electronic culture that comes from musicians and mail artists instead of geeks and gizmos.

If the Internet's technical pedigree hails from the RAND Corporation, Berkeley, and MIT, At a Distance proves that its social wellsprings span a much wider geography of creative eruptions, from Mexico's estridentistas to Brazil's Xerofilms, from Tokyo's Mini-FM to Brisbane's InterRaves. As a network artist and critic, I fancied before I read this book that I had a pretty good handle on precursors to Internet art. But I was enlightened--and a bit overwhelmed--by the rich lode of unfamiliar history dug up by the authors of this anthology.

In fact, one of my few criticisms of the book would be that the editors seem to have trouble corralling all of these dispersed activities into a coherent historical shape. With the exception of a couple large-scale topics like Fluxus, each essay addresses a different micro-movement in isolation, without comparing or contrasting them. This may be consistent with the ethic of many of the works, as exemplified by Fluxus artist George Brecht's prescription for "a network of active points all equidistant from the center." Nevertheless, I found it hard to grasp the larger picture of new media's family tree without knowing more about the affiliations and antagonisms of its branches.

Apart from the relationships among these movements, another set of dots the reader must connect on her own lies between the examples of networked art of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s and Net art of the 1990s and 2000s. With the exception of Tilman Baumgaertel's essay--which is also the only contribution to touch on the critical precedent of Conceptual art--there are very few references to actual artworks from today's electronic networks.

These quibbles aside, At a Distance contains enough new research to plug a good number of holes in the late 20th-century art historical record, and the editors at least attempt to unite the material via some thematic generalizations--probably the most important of which is that networks are about connecting people rather than Ethernet cables. Besides, given the isolated nature of the commentaries you really don't need to read the book's pages in order anyhow. Readers inspired by John Cage's random juxtapositions may want to work backwards from the index, slicing through the book by following references to specific movements or people like Ray Johnson or Radio art.

However you approach this text, it's a great antidote to the Wired-inspired myopia that focuses on the latest gadget or trend.

MIT Press impresses with another beautifully designed book, presented as an anthology of "precursors to art and activism on the internet." Editors Chandler and Neumark set the tone in their introduction by attempting to refute recent scholarship which finds both alpha and omega on the WWW, suggesting, no insisting, that there was indeed life before HTML. It's an interesting collection of documents, some from sources very far afield, most all of them fascinating both to look back on in nostalgia, others we watch and recall with amazement amounting to shock, for they describe experiments in the past which we are repeating again to our diminishment.

John Held, Jr., provides a succinct account of "Mail Art Exhibition," reminding us of Mail Art's utopian beginnings within the gathered contexts of Fluxus and Black Mountain experimentation (1940s, 1950s), When he recalls the "vanished borders" that Mail Art was supposed to float blithely over, we think now with bitterness of the tracking devices with which it is said we are going to now be adding to all of our overseas mail, not to mention our passports. For every innovation, comes a reduction in our personal freedom--such is true of the net as well of course with its "cookies" etc.

Melody Sumner Carnahan contirbutes a charming memoir of working with some visionary artists in the far-away, long-ago 1980s while creating Burning Books and allied artists projects. by turns her writing is hilarious, wry, witty and quite touching. Roy Ascott is a little scary recalling the psychic experiments of the 1960s, including X FILES type of parapsychology experiments, which even in the Cold War represented some kind of like minds thinking in Russia and the US. I love him meeting up with Luiz Antonio Gasparetto, a "Brazilian psyhcic who demonstrated the ability to paint four paintings, each in the style of a different 'modern master,' siumultaneously with his feet and hands." Ascott managed to film Gasparetto doing this! Wish I had access to that footage! In general the individual art object is downplayed, a characteristic of current art practice, in favor of networked and relational (often "serial") projects.

Though the book seems strangely Bay Area-cenrric, I have the suspicion this is entirely coincidental, or perhaps more than anything else it is a symptom of our propensity here to work communally and to ignore as far as possible the ego drives of the individual artist. John Bischoff's account of Mills College (Oakland) as the center for the "LEAGUE OF AUTOMATIC MUSIC COMPOSERS" is a mind-shiveringly inspiring version of the same. Funny that the book comes to us all the way from Sydney, Australia, where the two editors both work at the University of Technology there.

"The cultural convergence of art, science, and technology provides ample opportunity to challenge the very notion of how art is produced and to call into question its subject matter and its function in society...Envisoned as a catalyst for enterprise, research, and creative and scholarly experimentation, the [Leonard] book series enables diverse intellectual communities to explore common grounds of expertise." The 20 collected articles by professors, artists, curators, and writers in this book in the Leonard series from MIT press fulfill this purpose. The global communications network for organizing and reporting the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, email art, computer-created and disseminated music, and telecommunication are among the subjects examined in exploring the new forms of art and activism with the erosion of the lines between art, communication, technology, and computer science in contemporary culture. The international group of artists known as Fluxus, which celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2002, is but one activist group whose aim is the "elimination of art as a special activity." The essays offer new, out-of-the-box, perspectives on different much-publicized events (such as the Seattle demonstrations) and report on representative and influential groups, activities, and individuals that are little known by general readers. The essays as a whole give an unrivaled, panoramic view of what is going on in the broad, modern-day field which has come to be known as the media. As much perspective as possible on this widely diversified, extraordinarily, almost preternaturally, vibrant, and continually evolving field is given in showing the sources and precedents of the ideas and activities. Some of these sources and precedents are surprising and intriguing. But this is what one expects from this collection of essays working toward a new, relevant way of seeing the world being shaped by the new media and technology.