Networked Art

by Craig J. Saper

The experimental art and poetry of the last half of the twentieth century offers a glimpse of the emerging networked culture that electronic devices will make omnipresent. Craig J. Saper demarcates this new genre of networked art, which uses the trappings of bureaucratic systems-money, logos, corporate names, stamps-to create intimate situations among the participants. In Saper's analysis, the pleasures that these aesthetic situations afford include shared special knowledge or new language among small groups of participants. Functioning as artworks in themselves, these temporary institutional structures-networks, publications, and collective works-give rise to a gift-exchange community as an alternative economy and social system. Saper explains how this genre developed from post-World War II conceptual art, including periodicals as artworks in themselves; lettrist, concrete, and process poetry; Bauhaus versus COBRA; Fluxus publications, kits, and machines; mail art and on-sendings. The encyclopedic scope of the book includes discussions of artists from J. Beuys to J. S. G. Boggs, and Bauhaus's Max Bill to Anna Freud Banana. Networked Art is an essential guide to the digital artists and networks of the emerging future. Craig J. Saper is associate professor of multimedia at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and is the author of Artificial Mythologies (Minnesota, 1997).

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Alexander Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was perhaps just a little ahead of its time, just so much so that it misses the trolling and memetic revolution that happened just 5 years later on 4chan, Reddit, and elsewhere. This book might be very well paired with Whitney Phillips' work in _This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things_.

Yet, even despite its early arrival, it seems that Saper has captured something very interesting about social networks as sociopoetics. He has managed to capture some common affects or psychosis-as-identity work that link Internet meme networks and many of the fandoms, underground modernist, absurdist movements from the 1910s-1970s. He also has managed to imply some interesting things about creative, political, and institutional change that happens to art when the original "artist" gives up some of their agency to the interactive setting that they submit their art. It seems there are really strong parallels to these movements in mail-group art forms and closed Facebook groups (as an example).

This is a great book! I would recommend this to anyone studying rhetoric, art, political identity work, or qualitative aspects of online communities, collectives, or crowds. These ideas existed before the Internet, and this book is a great framing for that argument.