frequently asked questions about mail art
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			What is Mail Art? Correspondence art (Mail art) Term applies to art sent through the post rather than displayed or sold through conventional commercial channels, encompassing a variety of media including postcards, books, images made on photocopying machines or with rubber stamps, postage stamps designed by artists, concrete poetry and other art forms generally considered marginal. John Held Jr. The Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner, Macmillan Publishers Limited 1996
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			How can I become a mail artist? You can become a mail artist by sending a piece of your own creativity through the snail mail to names and addresses you find through links to current mail art invitations by searching for "mail art exhibition" and "mail art invitation" using an Internet search engine or on mail art messsage boards such as www.plexus.org/chalkboard/oneworld.
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			What is the Mail Art network? According to Doris Bell in Contemporary Art Trends 1960-1980, "mail art, began by Marcel Duchamp in 1916 when he sent his ideas by postcard, has grown into a worldwide network...The mailing of ephemeral material to freinds, begun by Ray Johnson in the 1950's, mushroomed into a kind of dadaist pen-pal club that circumvents the gallery system and so is an alternative to accepted ideas of art."
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			Is the Mail Art network like the Internet? The Correspondence Art Network had already been through several generations of artists who implemented numerous technologies of communication by the time the Internet became internationally available. By the mid-1990s art networkers had experimented with wave after wave of popular communication tools: mail, offset printing, photocopy, fax, tourism, personal computers, and increasingly used the Internet. Because of their history with these media, some artists feel that they pioneered systems that are basic functions of the Internet. For example, the function to create distance-independent communities seems like an old idea, already long practiced in the Correspondence Art Network, whose artists have been working as a distributed community for decades. Beginning in the 1990s, correspondence artists used the Internet to expand their distributed community by creating digital versions of the most effective means of information distribution developed in their network. These digital versions include: unedited interviews, artist's statements, exhibitions of images on Web sites, conversations on message boards, and emails. These methods all have analogous counterparts in traditional correspondence art. Interviews were long established in zines and in the TAM project. Artist statements and image distribution were customary in exhibition documentation and in zines. Emails are parallel to letters, and message boards take on the announcement and publication functions of zines. The electronic variations, together with their searchability on the Internet, create a productive and growing source of literature. This expanding literature provides sources of data to compare dynamics and values within the Correspondence Art Network. from Honoria - 2003 dissertation - Effects of the Internet on the Correspondence Art Network
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