At a Distance:
Precursors to Art and Activism on the
Internet
by Annmarie Chandler and Norrie Neumark
The MIT Press, Cambridge MA USA, 2005
496 pp. Trade, $39.95/£25.95
ISBN: 0-262-03328-3.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan
48710
mosher@svsu.edu
Chandler and Neumark have assembled a
rich history of telematic art using FAX
and videotext, public access television,
networked electronic music essentials,
decommodified conceputal art, artists
publications, and goofy performance groups.
Not only do these significant examples
predate the Internet (which has made global
delivery of art, texts, music and video
so much easier and inexpensive) but they
contain political or socially critical
content...or at least make fun of authority
and the powers that be.
There are features on artists Kit Galloway
and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Tesuo Kogawa,
and culture-jamming consortium Negativland.
Johanna Drucker discusses Aesthetics,
and Maria Fernandez examines the group
Estri-Dentistas. Stephen Perkins provides
historical perspective on artists' magazines,
including Arftorum, which was purposely
named to cause confusion with Art Forum.
John Held Jr.not to be confused
with the 1920s humorous illustrator of
that namegives an account of the
early days and flowering of Mail Art.
Held traces the ongoing influence of Fluxus
and artist Ray Johnson's New York Correspondance
School in 1962, but stops his account
before Ryosuke Cohen's international Brain
Cell project, which has had over 600 issues
of collaborative prints since the 1980s.
This reviewer learned how Eduardo Kac,
now noted as a biotech artist for his
living gene-spliced phosphorescent rabbit,
was once a noted opponent to Brazil's
government. Jesse Drew gives a history
of Paper Tiger Television and their subsequent
1990s Deep Dish Network. Roy Ascott, an
early theorist of telematic art and organizer
of the virtual university Planetary Collegium,
examines the simultaneous transmission
project La Plissure du Texte. This
reviewers' sole complaint is that there
is not enough imagery in the book. Granted,
conceptual art privileges the idea over
what Marcel Duchamp called the "retinal"sensual
visual pleasuresbut I'd like
more pictures illustrating these useful
texts.
Networks are not always progressive. They
can be top-down, and citizens of the United
States must be vigilant to protect the
Internet's current "net neutrality" that
prevents any exclusive corporate hegemony
that excludes alternative voices. Nevertheless,
this anthology proves with persuasive
evidence that inspired artists have prototyped
and created working models of the best,
most diverse traditions we now find in
cyberspace.