At a Distance Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet

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 Distanceeffectively 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 Distancetraces 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.

Annmarie Chandler is Director of Emerging Field in New Media and Digital Culture at University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

Norie Neumark, a sound and media artist, is Honorary Professorial Fellow at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, and Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne. She coedited At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet and VOICE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, both published by the MIT Press.