Early Networked+Distributed Art

In an earlier post, telecommunications art pioneer Robert Adrian was quoted: “…it was Mail-Art with its concept of postal space - a blizzard of images circling the globe through the integrated postal services - that made it possible to conceive of artworks in the electronic space of the new networks.” Here’s Wikipedia’s definition and history of Mail Art:

Mail art is art which uses the postal system as a medium. Mail art is also, simultaneously, a message that is sent, the medium through which it is sent as well as one of the longest-lasting art movements in history. To be precise, an amorphous international mail art network evolved of thousands of participants in over fifty countries between the 1950s and the 1990s from the work of Ray Johnson and influenced by earlier groups, including Dada, the Surrealists and Johnson’s contemporaries in the Fluxus group. Mail artists characteristically exchange ephemera in the form of illustrated letters, zines, rubberstamped, decorated or illustrated envelopes, artist trading cards, postcards, ‘artistamps’, mail-interviews and three-dimensional objects.