Networking: Thinking About Mail Art, with and Without Technology ed. by Chuck Welch (review)

BOOKS NETWORKING: THINKING ABOUT MAIL ART, WITH AND WITHOUT TECHNOLOGY edited by Chuck Welch, University of Calgary Press, Alberta, Canada, 1995. 304 pp., illus., $39.95. ISBN: 1-89517627 -1. &viewed Uy Mit Mitropoulos, 11 Elpidos Street, Athens 10434, Greece. Postage rates have greatly increased, complains a Pasadena writer in this book of coffee-table dimensions; he predicts a high-tech shift for mail artists in the 1990s. However, mail art is about operating on the global scale; it is also about global concerns-this does not have to be, but the book saysit is so, and I agree. A check on the list of authors (p. 250) confirms residences in cities of longitude and latitude (and related economies) different than those of the Los Angeles area (and of the other 23 North American contributors)-namely: Liege, Viareggio, London, Oslo, Modene, Trogen, Frankfurt , Montevideo, Elblag La Plata, Stockholm, Eysk,Accra, Wellen, Nishinomiya and Athens. Some of these are places where we still have problems getting the phone lines to work, no matter what the sophisticated end-equipment is-not to mention places where a sizeable majority of the planet's population have never in their lives made a single phone call and never will. The writer from Pasadena offers us (p. 129) the title ''The Future of Mail Reviews Panel:RudolfArnheim, SimonPenny, MasonWong, Stephen Wilson, Robert Coburn, Marc Battier, Thom Gillespie,Jason Vantomme, GeoffGaines, Clifft>rd Pickover, BarbaraLee, SonyaRopoport, RichardLand, P. Klutchevskaya, Paul Hertz,Francesco Giomi, Bulat M. Galeyev, Christopher Willard, Harry Rand, Gerald Hartnett, HenrySee, Kasey Asberry, Shawn Decker, RogerF.Malina, Rainer Voltz, Michele Emmer, CurtisKarnow, JoseElqUero, Youry Nazarov, Irina Presnetsoua, FrankP.Davidson, Mit Mitropoulos REVIE\VS Art." Another (p. 171) relates mail art to telecommunications art, but wisely does not substitute the latter for the former. A third author, a mail artist herself, makes me wonder: in a mail-art network, she (alone amongst the authors) refuses to give her mail address (or other means of contact-s-p. 251). In her paper (p. 219) she does provide a useful, if partial, indirect and incomplete explanation: the way I would put it in understandable telecommunications terms is that she perceives that our access opposes her privacy, and the more we have of the one, the less she gets of the other. The question is: what is the future of mail art in the Internet era? If pressed to be brief, I would say that the book gives two possible directions: Tourism and the Internet itself. These two directions may not be desirable to all of us but should be interesting for us all becausemail art involves networking over distance. And both these directions eliminate distance. Tourism does it, as a couple of co-authors (p. 147) put it by proposing to us, "the next step for mail artists to take ... is actually meeting face to face." They in fact put it into practice, took to the road and give us an account in an oversize diary-book on their colorful tourism (details on P: 284). On the other hand, high-tech connections afford us instant "live" exchange that is not tied to geography. Moving (tourism) and communicating (see the Internet or other means of telecommunicating), of course, have always been among human beings' basic activities. And both have played a central role in research during the last 25 years about the organization of spaceas , for instance, in Space Networks, where we have been considering space itself as a network rather than as a place. But is not distance an integral part of mail art? Is not connecting under the closed door or over the wide ocean what it is all about? But exactly what do we open the door and cross the water to do? We get no satisfactory answer here. Mail art is about networking , but networking "live"-with no time to reflect-to do exactly what? Again we are left wanting. One view from the on-line culture area can be found tucked in the "Networker Databank Appendix," Entry 91 (p. 285): "Although I miss sending and receiving visual, tactile mail art, I believe on-line environments and networks will be a more pervasive and lasting medium...