honoria madelyn starbuck dissertation

Chapter 4: Ruud Janssen and the TAM Web Site

This chapter is a case study of Ruud Janssen's  Travelling Art Mail (TAM) projects including his 1994-1998 interview project and his 1,000 page Web site.  This case study illustrates how one mail art networker pioneered uses of the Internet that dramatically departed from traditional mail art norms. Janssen's  interview project in which he asked artists about their uses of the Internet provides a historical base to ground my research.

Janssen's interview project shows a mail artist who is determined to learn more about his network by interviewing other artists in the mail art network as the Internet becomes available to use as a communication tool.  Janssen's networking art is influenced by his interest is in computers. In the 1994-1998 TAM interview project Janssen asked each artist about their own integration of computers into their art. So the TAM interview project set the stage for this research because I want to find out the effects of the Internet on the Mail Art Network.

This research continues the work of Janssen who asked mail artists about their uses of the Internet for mail art.  Unlike Janssen, who let the interviews develop as they went, I used a questionnaire to ask the same questions of each interviewee. These questions were about the artists adaptation to the Internet. The answers revealed a wide range of responses. My interviews are parallel to Janssen's original and will be valuable to future research as the Internet continues to influence the Correspondence Art Network.

INTRODUCTION TO RUUD JANSSEN

When Ruud Janssen was a child in the Netherlands, he first connected to international correspondence through his father’s hobby of collecting postage stamps.  In high school Janssen became interested in drawing and painting.  In 1980 Janssen studied physics in university and started a project called TAM for Traveling Art Mail. (Stetser, 1996) In those early years of TAM, Janssen combined art with postal experiments that included sending mail to fictitious addresses and mailing unusual envelopes to himself to see how they were processed through the postal system. In 1983, after several years of isolated mail experiments, Janssen discovered the Corrsepondence Art Network.

As Janssen became increasingly active as a correspondence artist he also became involved with computers, computer networks, and informatics. Informatics, a term for information science, investigates the properties and behavior of information, the forces that govern the flow and use of information, and the techniques of processing information for storage, retrieval, and dissemination. (Borko, 1968)  At the time of this research, Janssen taught informatics at Baronie College in the Netherlands.

THE COMBINATION OF MAIL ART AND COMPUTERS: THE TAM WEB SITE

As Janssen's connections multiplied, he became an important node for transmitting mail art information by publishing a newsletter called the TAM-Bulletin. In 1985 Janssen responded to his rapidly expanding mail art network by creating a version of the TAM-Bulletin that could be accessed through an electronic bulletin board system (BBS.) (Janssen, 1997c)  Since that first experiment in combining computer networks and mail art, Janssen's  TAM electronic initiatives have grown into the World Wide Web's largest Web site dedicated to correspondence  art. Janssen describes the natural progression that lead to his substantial web presence.

Why did I build my site? ...In 1985 I already experimented with data communication, my first modem was an acoustic one (300/300 baud) and even before Internet was available for the masses, I had a short e-mail address and worked in the BBS-world... When the Internet got affordable ...I entered the Internet at the DDS (Digital City of Amsterdam), and got the e-mail address tam@dds.nl.  After that things went automatically. Joy McManus was already online and informed me of the Geocities community. There I started to build my site in 1996 because I was publishing texts and the postage and sending was getting [to be] a problem. So, [I built the site as a result of] a combination of experimenting with new techniques and looking for practical purposes.... Now that the Internet-sites are normal for everyday work, I tend to not work that much on building them, but looking at the new ways that are possible. I guide my students in this and let them build the new things. (Janssen, 2002)

By the time the TAM Web site was three years old it was probably larger than any of the books ever written about mail art. The site has visitors from a wide range of places as Janssen mused in 1998:

The last 3 years I have been building this site, and as a result now [it is] over 1000 pages. In a way it is strange to experience that everybody has access to these pages. The mail art network, personal friends, unknown people, people from college....at the moment there are about 10 hits each day on the pages. About 40% comes from the Netherlands, another 30% from the USA, 26% from the rest of Europe, and only 4% from Africa, Asia, and South-America. (Janssen, 1998b)

The TAM Web site brings together an impressive amount of mail art history. An auxillary of the TAM Web site is the IUOMA message board established in 2001. Janssen's original 1996 TAM message board was not very active, possibly because the link to it was hard to find in all the other information on TAM. With Janssen as moderator, the message board is permeated with his questioning personality and research style. . The IUOMA message board has 100 members and is an active discussion of mail art.

LOOK AND FEEL OF TAM

The TAM Web site is alive with color, icons, animations, flashing text, and blue underlined words. The aesthetic effect is busy and cluttered; hypertext links jam closely together crammed into dense paragraphs, and flashing animations dot the screen. Janssen comments on why the design is frenzied:

Those animated gifs are always fun.  They bring life to the computer-screen, and make the texts on the screen different from the printed versions on paper. That is why I like them so much. These animated gifs aren’t always quickly made; it is like a little video-film in which you have to make every frame. (Janssen, 1998c)

The visually busy TAM pages do not seem strange to seasoned mail artists because paper-based mail art products are also routinely cluttered with small appropriated icons from popular culture around the world. Mail art aesthetics include hodgepodge juxtapositions of rubberstamps, artist stamps, paintings, collage, photographs, Xeroxes, drawings, and postal ephemera.

TAM IN CONTEXT

Artpool in Hungary and Vorctice Argentina are two artists' organizations that compiled large correspondence art Web sites built in 1995-1996 at the same time as the TAM site. These two Web sites contain historical material and essays on correspondence art networking.

ARTPOOL

Artpool is a collaboration between Júlia Klaniczay (editing), György Galántai (conception and design), and László Tölgyes (web technique).

Artpool is a non-profit alternative art institution in Hungary, with the objective to register changes in art, to present and document the most interesting art experiments and to promote artistic communication. (Artpool, 2002)

Artpool's Web site, built in 1996, consists of sections devoted to correspondence art texts, publications, and on-line shows documenting Artpool projects, and the chronology of Hungarian mail art. The art pool site map reflects the deep integration of mail art aesthetics and icons into the site design.

Illustration 6 is a sketch for the design of the Artpool Web site. The sketch represents a site map showing relationships of the conceptual parts of the site. The sketch uses an underlying sketch of a Ray Johnson bunny with an especially long nose to depict the chronology of images in Artpool's Web galleries. Artpool provides an centralized location of material by and about Johnson including a large collection of digitized Johnson mailings and a collection of essays on Johnson written by mail artists. Most of the published material about Ray Johnson is by curators of Johnson exhibitions. Their essays center on Johnson's fine art products and his relationships to other members of the 1960s art world. In contrast, the Artpool essays, written by mail artists and people who knew Johnson, concentrate on Johnson's key role as creator of the Mail Art Network. Artpool has a physical gallery and a public mail art archive in Budapest.

VORTICE ARGENTINA

Vortice Argentina is similar to Artpool because both organizations have extensive Web sites as well as physical locations that serve as galleries and community resources. Like Janssen, with his TAM Bulletin, Vortice Argentina has an electronic bulletin called Blast: Mail Art e-Bulletin published from March 1999 to January 2001. Distributed as an email, Blast contained information, news, visual poetry, and project invitations. Vortice Argentina's physical location in Buenos Aires is the Casa Argentina del Arte Correo, known as CADAC, a place for active meeting and participation. The purposes of CADAC are: to create a place of communication, exhibitions, and events by national and foreign artists; an experimental space to test new art proposals with [the] public, publicize artists' works outside and inside the city and [to publicize] artists contacted through the art mail circuit; and to provide the opportunity to facilitate dialog between  the artworks.. producer and the viewers. The CADAC library contains historical and current publications, fanzines, videos, photos, and catalogs related to correspondence art and visual poetry, and is designed to serve students, artists, researchers, critics, and the general public.  Artists' stamps, envelopes, postcards, seals, art objects, artists' books are on permanent exhibition and there is a place to purchase artworks by artists who wish to commercialize their work. The components of Vortice Argentina's Web site are listed in a spiral arrangement on their black and white interface site map in Illustration 7.

Artpool and Vortice Argentina are teams of artists who initiate community outreach services in their local communities and reach out into the international correspondence art movement. The goals of both organizations are oriented to the public as well as to the correspondence art community. In contrast, Janssen's Web site provides one artist's in-depth perspective on correspondence art phenomena and mainly serves the mail art community. Janssen investigates a variety of both traditional and online mail art activities including; interactions via message board and guest book, creation and distribution of small publications, organization of a mail artists' union, collection and display of an archive of rubber stamp impressions, autobiography, and display of examples of his mail art and fine art. The complex growth of the TAM Web site is a digitized record of Janssen's investigations.  No other correspondence art Web site reaches the depth of Janssen's scrutiny into the ways that correspondence art is affected by computer networks.  The TAM Web site itself is a project that transmediaed from the snail mail world to the Internet. The TAM Web site has never been static for long; Janssen constantly adds to it in seven simultaneous directions:

- TAM publications
- Interview project
- International Union of Mail Artists (IUOMA)
- Mail Art Links
- Biographical information on Ruud Janssen and examples of his fine art and documentation of some of his mail art
- Janssen’s recording of thoughts, secret thoughts and updates to the site
- Two interactive areas: the Mail Art Message Board and the guest book

The TAM Web site expands through additions of art, interviews, reflections, links, performances, personal thoughts, and writings from other networkers. Janssen's Web site expands in the way that a mail art archive multiplies, in ratio to artistic activity; the more Janssen sends, the more he receives.

TAM AS LITERATURE REVIEW

The TAM Web site is a source of literature for my research on the effects of the Internet on the Correspondence Art Network because all seven areas of TAM contain information on ways in which electronic networks influence the traditional network. Three key TAM areas are: a) Janssen's Thoughts and Secret Thoughts, b) Janssen's chart of communication forms (Table 1), and, c) the interview project, a series of 49 interviews with mail artists that take up the bulk of the Web site. Although the TAM interview project’s questions range over a variety of issues, this literature review concentrates on Janssen's questions and artists' answers about computers and the Internet. Patterns in the TAM interviews show how artists reacted to the Internet as it first became available to them during the period from 1994 to 1998.  In addition to the content of the interviews, Janssen himself implements a number of new communication-forms.  Janssen's experimentation creates a case study of the effects of the Internet on Janssen's own mail art networking as the Internet and the postal service simultaneously delivered Jansssen's virtual packets and physical envelopes around the globe.

I interviewed Janssen intermittently between 2000 and 2002. We primarily used email but we also chatted via instant messenger in my early Texas mornings and his early Dutch afternoons. In addition, we exchanged letters in decorated envelopes via airmail. Janssen also reviewed, suggested changes, and approved this chapter.

JANSSEN'S THOUGHTS ON MAIL ART

Much of the TAM Web site features text and digitized representations of mailed art works, but there is a more intimate section of the Web site in which Janssen records his personal reflections on mail art changes over a period of years.  Thoughts, numbered 1 through 18 from August 1993 through March 1998, and Secret Thoughts, numbered 1 through 9 from September 1997 to May 1998, offer a record of Janssen's own responses to changes in the networks. The Thoughts were written for a public audience and provide a sequence of snap shots of Janssen's observations.  Although posted online, and therefore not very secret, the Secret Thoughts have a more personal quality in which Janssen notes his approval or disapproval of specific actions or attitudes of networkers.

Janssen's evaluations of communication formats
Janssen's Communication-form chart (Table 1) compares the different communication formats ranging from snail-mail to telepathy.

http://www.iuoma.org/networking.html

FORM    ADVANTAGE    DISADVANTAGE
S-mail    Relatively cheap
Access for everybody
Sending of smells, structures,
3-D objects is possible    Takes relatively a lot of time
- Archiving takes a lot of space
E-mail    Speed
Manipulation of text and graphics
Archiving takes little space
- One simple address is enough to determine where the message goes to    Access to expensive hardware is needed
Costs for access
Reading of the message depends on the receiver to contact his / her host-computer
Fax    Speed
Message on paper arrives instantly at the receivers address    No color yet
Not always paper good for archiving
Phone bill for fax to foreign countries
Phone    Direct line
The voice is very personal communication form, and compared to a cassette the immediate reaction is there    Archiving only possible on tape
Expensive
Only possible when receiver is at home (or you need a machine)
Personal
Delivery    Cheap or expensive
Anything is possible
Speed depends on messenger    Depending on someone to pass by and going to the place you want your mail to go
Telepathic    Everything is possible    They haven’t found out how to do this yet
 Table 1: Communication-forms in Networking by Ruud Janssen
The chart illustrates Janssen's systematic thinking about issues of communication in relation to the techniques used or dreamed of by mail artists. He is concerned about expenses, technological implications, and pragmatic issues of space and archiving. Janssen's analysis of the advantages and disadvantages named in the chart also illustrate his concern for fairness and his awareness of the pros and cons of a variety of communication systems.

GENERATIONS IN MAIL ART
The most distilled discussion about changes Janssen witnessed over the years appears in the Thoughts section of the TAM Web site. In Thoughts about mail art part 11 he describes five generations of mail artists including a sixth, pre-mail art network, that he calls the "zero generation:"

The first generation; Ray Johnson who started NYCS with a selective group he chose to write to and asked them to play the game with him. Of course there is also the zero generation. Artists that already used the mail system for communication, art & play (Marcel Duchamp, Van Gogh) where individual artists were in contact with other artists through the mail in a creative way on a one-to-one basis. The second generation in the 60s - 70s when FLUXUS joined up and a selective group experimented with the mail system, the third generation where mail art rapidly grew in 70s - 80s because of the exhibitions and publications within the mail art network that spread the news to newcomers (this is where I joined the mail art network for the first time, and lots of the people I am still in contact with nowadays are from this 3rd generation). Not a limited group anymore, the concept that anybody could take part and be a member of the mail art network really took shape. This lead to the Congress-year in 1986, where anybody could organize a congress, as long as two or more mail artists had a meeting. The fourth generation, after the congress in 1986 the mail art population grew into a very large group. The end of the 80s and the beginning 90s was also the gradual beginning of the fifth generation, where communication was done with the use of computers. Mark Bloch (USA), Charles François (Belgium) and me (in Holland) already were working with BBSs to send out electronic mail. One of the congresses in the DNC-year [Decentralized Networking Congress-year] 1992 was done by Charles and me with a session of computer-congresses where we exchanged our thoughts without meeting. Our computers were our tools. In 1991 there was also the first networking-project REFLUX that use[d] the then elitair system of Internet, but in 1994 till now the Internet became a real option to communicate for the 'wealthy' countries. (Janssen, 1996f)

The concept for my mail-interviews is simple. I send the first question, and explain which possibilities the interviewed person has to reply. Depending on the answer I will send the next question, etc. Once finished I make a printed version of the complete interview and send it to the interviewed person, and keep one for myself. (Stetser, 1996)

Every TAM interview is a conversation between the interviewee and Janssen, but all those interviewed are aware that the interviews are to be published and distributed through the network. The artists are aware they are addressing the larger audience of all other mail artists. As the interview project was put on the Web, the audience expanded to new networkers and to anyone online.  
Illustration 8 shows a small section of the busy interface of the TAM Web site. This screen shot shows the textured blue background with densely packed blue underlined names of the interviewees as links to the interviews. Scattered around the paragraph of links are images of the covers of the printed interview booklets. The covers of the booklets are made up of collaged pieces of text and graphics in irregular patterns with the name and country of the interviewees, Mark Bloch (USA) and Michael Leigh (England) visible on two of the covers.

Illustration 8:  Closely-packed text links on the TAM Web site lead to individual interviews.

The links are illustrated by covers of the original interview booklets.
In character with Janssen’s multimedia interests, the interviews range in media. Even within the same interview the communications tools shift between snail mail, fax, disks sent through the post, e-mail, phone, and personal visits. As with other TAM experiments, the interview project starts in the postal systems and moves online. Initially the interviews were published in photocopied or printed booklets and were available by subscription.  The booklets were produced in two versions: a full booklet complete with illustrations, and a text-only version but the interviews posted on the TAM Web site were text-only.  Many interviews document changes that mail artists felt in response to the Internet. The interview project itself is an extensive example of how the Internet influenced one long-term mail art project because it transforms from the pre-Internet technique of small individual booklets into the core of the biggest Web site about mail art.

INTERVIEW PROJECT: THE SEARCH FOR THE WHOLE STORY
Janssen believes that the only way to know the mail art network is to be a mail artist. Being a mail artist himself gives Janssen the best qualifications to explore other artists’ views:

 I choose the mail artists that I was in contact with or the mail artists I had heard about. Mail art is a strange thing. Only by doing it one can find out what it actually is all about…. after becoming involved in mail art I couldn’t explain to others what mail art was, unless they were involved themselves too. The interviews were meant to find out what mail art was according to other mail artists. (Janssen, 2001)

I started with [the TAM] mail-interviews 2nd November 1994. At that time I also just switched to the use of Internet …and so I had a lot of communication possibilities to send out mail…. I just had read one of the interviews in the magazine ND with a mail artist, and realized that I was in contact with so many mail artists without knowing their “whole story”. In mail art you only get to see the part of the correspondents they send you by mail. So I realized I would like to read more about a lot of mail artists, but actually there isn’t that much to read besides the books with selections others made. (Stetser, 1996)

There are two main attitudes towards…"mail art" activity as a whole: one attitude consists in escaping the prison of the closed official art system (artist-critic-dealer-gallery-museum-passive audience) just to end up building another (more satisfactory) small ghetto-utopian fairyland (the "network" seen as a circle of "friends," where everyone knows each other and what is going on (mail artists - catalogues - exhibitions - magazines - meetings …). The other attitude consists (and I subscribe to this one) in seeing the mail art practitioners as just a tiny fragment of a global networking phenomenon (including the small and underground press, the tape network, what happens in free BBS, in some areas of the Internet, and then again fax-zines, phone-phreeks, etc.) where no one is physically able to keep trace of every net-focused thing that is going on in the planet, and where really anything can happen to link human consciousnesses together (without necessarily the need of an "art" tag). (Janssen, 1995h)

… active mail art networkers have a wealthy experience in worldwide exchange and also in connection to direct communication and the cooperation they can share their stories, they should participate immediately in the current discussions, wherever they take place. In particular during the 80s the mail art movement has developed its own field for world culture and discussion.  In many aspects the mail art network was a preparation of Internet. (Janssen, 1997a)

Most mail artists don't understand what Internet is good for. I'm not speaking in a technological sense. I'm speaking in terms of culture and communication. Mail art has hardly ever been about broad communication. It's based on small town culture writ large. The mail art network is insular, internalized, self-centered. There's little understanding of history and culture, even little knowledge about the history of mail art. The idea of artists who think this way of using the Internet as a new way to communicate is a joke. The results aren't interesting. (Janssen, 1995e)

Instead of Internet I suggested another solution for the networking, more advanced than Tourism: The Networkers' Teleportation….teleportation is [the] ability to transport physical bodies instantaneously to a new location without moving through the intervening space…. In that case, if such vehicle will be available to us, meetings will be immediate, without exhausting traveling, and … will make creative communication faster, more direct, amusing, unexpected and richer than Tourism and Internet are. (Janssen, 1997b)

The other side of E-mail is of course the speed of the DIRECT-transmission and through Internet the elusion of high postal rates. But for whom (?)...only for people who have…computer tools with access to Internet (you can forget practically 90% of the third world, they haven't got access to that technology), also most European artists are today not equipped with [their] own computers. (Janssen, 1996-97)

… computers are beyond the means of the average person in my country, Ghana. Besides, even when one has a computer it costs 100 dollars a month to have access to internet which means that it is only companies who make a good profit can afford this facility.…it would be impossible for me to get on the internet. (Janssen, 1995a)

… the art results, CREATIVITY! --  will [be] lost by using the E-mail. The electronic Communication has only one survival content: The SPEED! Look how fast I get your answer! But it comes from a machine, ONLY COPIES! You have the original. Mail Art always are personal ORIGINALS! ….The beginning of mail art included one very important point: the personal individual touch, a human sign, the intimacy of communication. You remember - Person to Person, activities in art!….I hope there will start another personal NETWORK!! And I hope, the real consequence of mail art could become the visual & concrete Poetry by MAIL, that means the small site and easy distribution. Digitalization of mail art will be a very poor variation of the roots. (Janssen, 1994-1995b)

Now, in 1995, the sending of this question to you by E-mail via INTERNET costs me half the price a normal envelope with the question would cost.... But the difference is that I send you the question in digital form. Just ASCII, and no color, no smell, no touch of my hand that you can trace. Is the electronic communication ready for artists? (Janssen, 1995f)

You say ... just ASCII, and no color, no smell, no touch of my hand that you can trace.…  I say- YES YES YES. I think you have given a good case in favor of it with your question. The electronic communication IS ready because there is no color, no smell, no handprints! The Internet needs artists! (Janssen, 1995f)

Ah, but then there is the Internet. Which is basically digital mail art and no less valid than Ray's traditional form. Its physical and tactile limitations are offset by its immediacy and awesome pervasiveness… Obviously E-mail and home sites will replace the mailbox and probably the telephone in the next century but I hope that takes awhile. (Janssen, 1996e)

The electronic media and appliances extend man's normal common presence in an unexpected manner transgressing the mesocosmos, i.e. the world of the middle, "slow", dimensions, that man is able to perceive without artificial expedients, to the world of velocity, speed, i.e. the microcosmos, macrocosmos and the fictions' cosmos, the dimensions of which man is able to perceive only by expedients.…the use of electronic media creates big dangers. As to the construction of reality by cognition and communication the "blind" use of electronic media…contains the risk that the media push themselves between men, that the media become the message, that the media create, simulate reality, that they overoll cognitive autonomy of man and his communicative competence…reality can become manipulated or vanish... (Janssen, 1995c)

My computer was very important in my introduction to the mail art network. I was on-line in the early days of Prodigy and there were a lot of people there interested in mail art. For me the most important contact I made was arto posto. She opened the door to the vastness of the network. (Janssen, 1996d)

The Mail Art tree not only has new branches; it now has fellow trees. Mail Art can't control the E-mail experience. E-mail can't control Mail Art. But they can inform each other. They can interact with one another. And they can move forward together. Because despite the differences of the mediums, they still have communication creativity as a common goal. Ray Johnson planted a tree in what has become a forest. (Janssen, 1994-1996)

[The mail art network] is founded on over thirty years of intensive experiences in the field of free and open exchange-communication. It is a wealth of wisdom that you just can't sum up in a few words or even in a single book, but I believe a mail artist approach to Internet will always be much more free-and-easy than the approach of people who had no previous networking experiences. (Janssen, 1995h)

In addition to Held's trust in organic growth, Baroni trusts mail art networkers to teach their strategies to people new to networking. We have seen artists talking about mail art in an interpersonal perspective and as a networking culture. Artists also view the effects of the Internet more abstractly.

INTERNET AS CONTEXT
Swiss artist H. R. Fricker is the founder of a branch of mail art called the Aggressive School of Cultural Workers and co-creator of the Decentralized World Congresses. The congresses encourage networkers to increase their level of communication by meeting to discuss all aspects of networking. Fricker seeks to affect systems of communication with his ideas, and his views of cyberspace reflect his systems view of mail art.
For my interests as an artist the Internet is not a transport system it is a context. This context is a communication system and a space system. The cyber space... As an artist I prefer to act in spaces. That means I have to change strategies and instruments all the time. Each artistic act is an intervention that changes the system and I know that I am a part of the system too. (Janssen, 1997a)
While some artists see the Internet as a mechanical machine of reproduction or a very fast distribution system, Fricker abstracts the Internet into a cyber space system that opens new spaces in which artistic actions take place.

Held's tree-branch trust, Baroni's belief that the networking experiences of mail artists will ease the way for Internet communications, and Fricker's concept of cyber performance space are countered by considerations of impermanence and constant displacement.

IMPERMANENCE
Dick Higgins saw a number of communications trends in his life as a correspondence artist, small press publisher, and writer.  Higgins describes the perpetually changing facets of the 1995 Internet, "Yes, 'exploring' is the only possible word, since the Internet is constantly changing. You can "know" yesterday's Internet, but today's always contains new variables."  (Janssen, 1995b)
Argentinean poet Edgardo-Antonio Vigo mailed concrete poetry and stamp art poetry into the network. Vigo’s theoretical writings place his work in context with dada and surreal object poems. His view of  "a TOTAL ART… [in which] we will arrive at the conquest in which the CONSUMER passes into the category of CREATOR. " (Vigo, 1998) is very much in keeping with ideals of openness supported by mail artists.  His TAM interview was not finished at the time of his death in 1997.  Vigo expresses his opinion of the Internet as a foreshadowing of an ominous future of permanent impermanence:

Actual technology invents permanently new ways of communication. For the moment INTERNET is the "boom" but I think, before this can be used by the artists, it will be another system, better, surpassing its possibilities.  I am certain, that dramatic situation is due of a technology which progresses in a permanent way.  Before analyzing the results, there are other ones, more sophisticated and better….This 'CONSTANT DISPLACEMENT' has brought an evident displeasure, its result are rather ominous for Society.   (Janssen, 1996b)

American poet and mail artist, John Bennett saw printed material as more permanent than digital when he told Janssen:

I don't see electronic media as replacing books, say, but as another kind of media with its own values. There's something about a book, a physical object you can hold in your hands, completely self-contained, that you can deal with in your own time, that has permanent value.(Janssen, 1995d)

Permanence and impermanence continue to be important considerations, not only for individual art works, but also for whole collections of art works and publications in archives.

CORRESPONDENCE ART, THE INTERNET, AND ARTISTS WITH PHYSICAL DISABILITIES
Two artists discuss physical access to computers. For example, the computer helped arto posto to communicate after she was injured:

I discovered computers after being in a very bad auto accident that makes handwriting and doing many things by hand painful for me. Keyboarding and working on the computer is not. I think that is, in part, why I do so much of my mail art by computer. (Janssen, 1996c)

On the other hand, the computer screen causes physical discomfort for John Bennett:

The Internet has been interpreted as an environment that “levels the playing field” for people with disabilities. The Internet allowed arto posto more access to the Correspondence Art Network, but the Internet did not open additional opportunities for John Bennett. New research in Web accessibility (World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Institute for Techology and Learning at The University of Texas) report new tools and methods for sharing text, sound, and video files that may open networks of exchange to more artists with disabilities, but at the time of the TAM interviews accessibility tools and guidelines were very limited.
The TAM interview files contain hundreds of observations on changes in correspondence art activities caused by increased availability of computers and electronic networks.  The quotes from the 1990s TAM interview project indicate the range and intensity of mail artists' responses to the new technologies.  The TAM interview project provides a background in which to place findings of the Clashing and Converging 1999-2000 research.

CRITICISM OF JANSSEN'S PROJECT

Although the TAM Web site is generally accepted as an important collection of mail art information, several mail artists critique it. Cracker Jack Kid is one of the early and most enthusiastic endorsers of mail artists’ use of the Internet for trans-network experiments that he calls Telenetlink.  Although Janssen is also an early adopter of networked technology, Cracker Jack Kid expresses concern that the interview project and the TAM Web site presents a conservative view of mail art to newcomers who learn about the movement from Janssen's perspective:

While I enjoyed his tireless line of questioning...I often longed for more challenging and less conservative varieties of questions in regard to how online mail art could be an innovative, groundbreaking intermedia form. (Welch, 2001)

Cracker Jack Kid also wonders if Janssen's Web site will dull the perception of younger artists who learned about mail art via the TAM web site.

Ruud’s Web site mirrors the snailmail world of mail art collecting and exchange… I worry that all those online mail art interviews might give younger cyberwarriors a rather one-sided image of a conservative world of snailmail art exchange. Then again, it may be these younger artists who will grasp an alternative notion of intermedia networking that will make that quantum jump of imagination many of us were not ready to make throughout the 1990s. (Welch, 2001)

While Cracker Jack Kid's reservations about the TAM Web site are concerned with its effects on newcomers to mail art, Stephen Perkins, in his 1996 interview, regrets that Janssen is not analyzing or theorizing from the interview data.

I must admit I am finding this e-mail interview is turning into a very fragmented experience.  With all the time between question and answer it seems a certain thread and coherence is getting lost. I am also finding your questions to be very broad and generalized, not that I want specificity as such but at least some kind of conceptual approach to this whole area of networking, a kind of critical rigor, something that I can bounce my responses off.... While I appreciate the enormous task you have taken on, and the importance of these kind of oral histories, it just seems that that is all the publications on networking seem to contain at the moment. (Janssen, 1996a)

In contrast to reservations voiced by Cracker Jack Kid and Perkins, Vittore Baroni enthusiastically appreciates the importance of the mail interviews as a collective reflection of the raw history of mail art.  Baroni writes that the whole network is often invisible to people who are not already involved; he emphasizes the value of the interview project to the “spirit of mail art:

... a project like your (mail-interviews) is very important to the spirit of mail art, exactly like the Decentralized Congresses of past years, because it activates on a (semi)public level A COLLECTIVE REFLECTION on a phenomenon that tends naturally to remain invisible and private. Yours was a very simple idea, but that will surely be fertile of positive results, and for this I must thank you enormously. (Janssen, 1995h)

Regardless of pro and con responses to his work, Janssen is passionate about learning as much as possible about mail art.  He invests a significant amount of time and money making, sending, and documenting mail art products, actions, and trends. As the story of mail art unveils around him, Janssen knows the difficulty of locating and accessing mail art literature and feels that the Internet has potential to make foundational information available to the next generations of mail artists:

The new mail art networkers that started in the 90s have the advantage that they have lots of material to look back on. Especially in the 80s the publications about mail art hit the network. Although the written history never is the complete story, reading these publications gives indeed a wealth of information. The problem however is to get access to the information. Not many libraries have these publications, and the many mail artists that have them in their 'archives' are quite hesitant to lend them to others most of the time. The Internet is bringing a solution. More and more texts are being made on the computer. These files can be accessed through the Internet. I know that a lot of networkers don't have access, but the new generation learns to use Internet at college. The shift is eminent. (Janssen, 1996f)

As a result of his years of active mail art exchange, the stories in the interview project, and his profession in informatics, Janssen observes first hand the massive changes in the several networks in which he is involved.

IMPLICATIONS
Janssen places a significant slice of unedited history onto the World Wide Web thereby providing a wealth of raw data for researchers.  From the gold mine of TAM data I used only nuggets relating to the effects of the Internet, but other researchers can look at the same interviews, and Janssen's reflections, to find clues to other aspects of art history, aesthetics, political views, and the clashing and converging of radical art trends in late 20th century art and communication.

 
Comparing the mailed versions of the interview project with the web versions presents an illustration of the effects of the Internet on access to mail art history. For example, Janssen’s little interview booklets, mailed out over years as slim volumes of single interviews, were small individual elements of mail art. Each booklet was a brief look into the thoughts of one other networker. The booklets are a stark contrast to the bulk and density of information on the TAM Web site where all the interveiws are surrounded by hundreds of pages of observations, links, and images. Janssen's meticulous personality, preference for raw interview data, and his profound respect for mail art permeate the entire 1,000 Web pages. The information massed on the TAM Web site is simultaneously the whole interview collection plus records of Janssen's life devoted to mail art. As he documented changes in the Correspondence Art Network Janssen was also responsive to continuous changes in creative uses of rapidly developing communication tools. In Janssen's view, most mail artists do not achieve the potential of the Internet with their Web sites because they create static HTML pages and do little to maintain them. In contrast, Janssen determinedly updates the TAM Web site because he feels a strong responsibility to provide a true representation of the mail art network, its evolution, and himself as part of its dynamic history.

Janssen's combination of art, science, and his intense focus, explains why there is so much raw data on the Web site.  Janssen sees his duty, as an insider with growing computer skills and knowledge of both networks, to publish his research so that others can access the wealth of information that he has collected.  Janssen's sense of fairness and mail art generosity dictates that he publish the stories of other networkers and his own story in order to inform people who come to the mail art network through electronic connections. The stories on the TAM Web site are part of a still-unfolding tale, an account of what it was like when the Internet first entered the lives of mail artists.  Viewing the interviews as a whole, it is evident that many mail artists feel that the Internet brings profound changes to the international mail as depicted in Chapter 8. The TAM interviews are close ups of artists meditating upon the meaning of the Internet to their community, to their practices, and to world culture.

Did the predictions in the interviews come true? Did Cracker Jack Kid's cyberwarriors make quantum leaps? Were mankind's cognitive competencies splintered, as Henning Mittendorf predicted? Did an exodus of mail artists leave the postal system in favor of digital media? The questions in this 1999-2001 research follow leads from the 1994-1998 TAM interviews in order to record and analyze the continuing effects of the Internet on the mail art network. The next two chapters consist of stories from the 1999-2001 Clashing and Converging interviews and a collection of mailed artworks to illustrate the effects of the Internet on the Correspondence Art Network.

Honoria Madelyn Starbuck, 2003

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