Abstract

Clashing and Converging: Effects of the Internet on the Correspondence Art Network

Honoria Madelyn Starbuck, Ph.D.
1999-2003 dissertation research
The University of Texas at Austin

This study examines the effects of the Internet on an international community of artists who have exchanged art through postal systems for 40 years. The methods of grounded theory are employed to collect and analyze three types of data: 1) literature collected from Internet communities where the artists converse and publish artworks, 2) interviews with artists who have experience in both electronic and traditional network environments, and 3) artworks that express artists' visual and poetic responses to the Internet. The data reveal three clusters of artists' concerns: social, artistic, and art historical. With global electronic networks contributing toward technological change and aesthetic shifts in their art, artists express concerns about shifting structures in their social networks, as well as threats to their traditions and to the relics of their own history. Artists identify interrelationships and strategies that emerged during the 40-year history of the Correspondence Art Network that are in jeopardy of being replaced by new technologies and new forms of networking. The conclusions suggest future research in the fields of aesthetics, women artists, the archives of the correspondence art movement, and emerging networked art. Continued research into creative networked systems will serve to protect the correspondence art archives, increase our understanding of a long-lived art movement, and highlight strategies for successful implementation of distributed communities across disciplines.