mail art and the internet

Here are some links to information available online about Mail Art:

mailart.org - a blog dedicated to the general mail art scene and open mail art calls; also home to the Small Art Project. I love their header/banner image.

Mailartist.com - Education and resources for mailart, ATC's, postcards, envelopes, and artistamps.

The Electronic Museum of Mail Art - their slogan is "the envelope is the museum." Looks like the person in charge of this site is Chuck Welch, who wrote or edited a couple of the books on our bibliography.

Nervousness.org - an online forum for the Mail Art community

And here are links to just a few Mail Art-related projects that are at least partially distributed on-line:

BOOK: Collaborative exhibition of a sketchbook shared by four artists from both sides of the Atlantic. I like the simplicity of the site, which really just documents the project, but the project definitely depended upon the international postal system to create a small network and communication system between the four artists. It's a great example to think about the transition from art practice (the sketchbook) to the mailbox and back to the white box (check out the exhibition page).

The Envelope Collective - an ongoing collaborative experiment in art that uses the transportation of mail as a medium. This one's both a document of past submissions while also using the Internet as an interactive tool in order to get additional examples.

Mail Art Postcard Exhibition - an exhibit of mail art postcards that uses Blogger as its platform. This is another open call so that you can participate! Some really nice examples for our first project.

Coffee Mail Art Project - A mail art project with the theme of coffee. I love this one because there are so many Mail Art sites and Mail Art projects; it's nice to find one with a theme or niche. And I love coffee...

Mail Art Projects - an interactive blog-based index/overview of Mail Art projects. Very meta.

Mail Interviews by Rudd Janssen, in blog format.

The Miniature Book Library - send in 5 miniature books and get four in return. Classic Mail Art model but using the Internet to disseminate the call.

The Poetry Postcard Project - a nice way to give form to your poetry, for any of you who may be writers as well as visual artists. Nice site design.

PostSecret - this guy solicits your secrets on postcards and posts whatever he receives that week each Sunday on this blog format. There are lots of similar projects on the web but I'm pretty sure this is one of the first to solicit secrets from strangers.

SpiralMail - While I enjoy the coffee theme of the project a few links above, on the other hand, I really like the openness of this one. Sometimes you have to try really hard to get folks to interact but sometimes something so simple can inspire communication and participation. Another project that uses the blog format.

Veronica Millon's cross-stiched envelopes. These make me so happy...I'm not even completely sure why. I applaud her for taking advantage of a pre-existing format like PictureTrail but I think the project deserves a site re-design! This is a great example of creating envelopes or postcards from unusual materials.

This is just a small smattering of examples. Many of these links have links to other sites and on-line projects and a search for Mail Art will give you tons of examples to look at.