curiousMail art is a self-referential system of signs. You have to be in mail art for a while before you see enough signs to really appreciate the good conversations and the great conversations taking place by way of these signs. The best way to enter the fray is to host a mail art show. Then you see a barrage of mail about one subject, one theme and are exposed to a great range of mail art signs and symbols and abstractions, some relating directly to your theme and some relating to the systems of mail art itself. Tonight I looked at a piece I received some time ago from an artist named Daniel Boyer and it just blew me away once again. The box it came in had stamps from the 1990s commemorating virtual reality, the web, and computer graphics. There was a single sheet of paper inside the priority mail box. It was a print out of a paragraph of text at the top and the rest of the sheet had a wonderful drawing. I'll type the text:
The advent of computer networks (from gopher and ftp to the World Wide Web) and their technological advances in mass access to them have had a very small effect on the actual processes I have use to produce mail-art; what effect there has been has been somewhat obvious and superficial, i.e., the infrequent appearance of computer-network-related items in my drawing on envelopes, such as concrete representations of the "information superhighway," and the use of stamps issued by the United States Postal Service related in some way to such computer networks. The greater influence has been in my increased ability to know about mail-art networks and exhibitions through computer bulletin boards. 29 November 2000
I'll scan the image and maybe put a link in this blog. But it may be the cover of my dissertation. Definitely an important illustration.
