Bridging Networks: How Mail Art and Social Media Can Help Each Other

When I was a baby, my father, mail artist Crackerjack Kid, took a photo of me inside of a mailbox, and sent it to Ray Johnson. He replied, “love that kid!” Thus began my lifelong affiliation and complicated relationship with mail art as a digital native and progeny of a first generation mail artist. Both mail art networks and social networks boast utopian ideas of democracy, decentralization, and freedom of information. They are also bound by their origins. Mail art is a physically limited medium married to a Eurocentric model of the postal system, while social media is built on algorithms that guide us towards likeminded people at the expense of polarization and our privacy. As an artist who has witnessed mail art pre and post social media, I feel the deep anxiety over how communication and creative practices are changing in mail art and the world at large. We have hard work ahead to preserve mail art as both a powerful art form and historical precursor to our current networks. At the same time we must recognize how apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and Periscope can expand mail art networks so the voices of women, queer folx, and people of color are better heard. This presentation is a call to imagine and implement communication techniques from each network to bolster the stability and longevity of both digital and analog fields.