
From Leonardo
At a Distance
Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet
Overview
Author(s)
Praise
Summary
The theory and practice of networked art and activism, including mail art, sound art, telematic art, fax art, Fluxus, and assemblings.
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.
Hardcover
Out of Print ISBN: 9780262033282 496 pp. | 7 in x 9 in 50 illus.Paperback
$45.00 X ISBN: 9780262532853 496 pp. | 7 in x 9 in 50 illus.Endorsements
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The book is an exhilarating, eye-opening read that restores the body to the virtual and pulls the virtual out of the digital and back into lived and produced social relations.
Patricia R. Zimmermann
Department of Cinema and Photography, Ithaca College
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The book is an exhilarating, eye-opening read that restores the body to the virtual and pulls the virtual out of the digital and back into lived and produced social relations.
Patricia R. Zimmermann
Department of Cinema and Photography, Ithaca College