Email art
Email art is simply any kind of art sent by email. It includes computer graphics, animations, screensavers, digital scans of artwork in other media, or even ASCII art. When exhibited, email art can be either displayed on a computer screen or similar type of display device, or the art can be printed out and displayed.
There is an ongoing debate among some artists as to just what the relationship of email art to mail art should be considered to be. In addition to questions about whether this is even a valid or meaningful genre of art, as clearly almost any kind of digital-based art can be emailed, thus making it into "email art," has been particular criticism of email art by tradition-minded mail artists when the email art has been perceived to be akin to mass media. Other criticisms of email art from a mail artist's perspective have focused on the lack of dimensionality of the attachment, the lack of intimacy as opposed to real mail.
Email art is an offshoot of the networking mail art movement of the early 1990s. Chuck Welch, also known as Cracker Jack Kid, connected with early online artists and created a net-worker telenetlink. The historical evolution of the term "Email Art" is documented in Chuck Welch's Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology published and edited by University of Calgary Press. [1] In 1997, with the participation of 35 mail-artists (such as Vittore Baroni, Ken Friedman, John Held Jr., Reed Altemus, Honoria, H.R. Fricker, Ruud Janssen, Steven Perkins, Gyorgy Galàntai, Pawel Petasz and Géza Perneczky) Guy Bleus publishes the first E-Mail-Art Manifesto, called: Re: The E-Mail-Art & Internet-Art Manifesto in his electronic zine E-Pêle-Mêle: E-Mail-Art Netzine, Hasselt, Belgium.
