Mail Art Chro No Logy

Jack Seiei: Introducing For Affirmative Action:
Sign, Embellish with Art, Copy & Distribute

manuscript, 2017

A NEW-NET Freedom Manifesto 2017
(A 2017 Art Without Walls Initiative)

In May 1972, during the early era of internetworking and ARPANET, before a telematic art presence, mail artists birthed the proto-internet. This was not the network of a school, a fanclub, or an individual central authority. Networking began with a group of twenty six artists issuing a NET Statement and address-list through the coordination of two Eastern Block Polish conceptualists, Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski. In nine points the NET Statement set forth a new era designated as open and uncommercial with net origins in private homes, studios, or any other place where art propositions are articulated. They encouraged collaborative editions in book forms, prints, tapes, slides, photographs, catalogues, films, handbills, letters and manuscripts that had no central point or coordination. They theorized before the advent of the internet, world-wide-web, or telenetlink that the NET could be anywhere. They visualized that all points of the NET are in contact among themselves in the exchange of concepts, projects, and other forms of articulation. In 2012 A NEW-NET Manifesto was signed and distributed by 45 international net-artists. Today, five years after the manifesto was issued, we have entered a dangerous era in which far-right politics have threatened the very core of our freedom to create and imagine without the fear of censorship, incarceration and torture. In the face of such adversity, there is an abiding need for affirmation and empowerment by creative artists regardless of nationality, race, creed, or gender. As such, A NEW-NET Freedom Manifesto exists for anyone to blog, perform, sign, copy, distribute and embellish with ART, mail art, emailart, net.art. We are an international initiative advocating the preservation of art in education, in our homes, communities, and public spaces.

*Please notify CrackerJack Kid (jackkidmusic at gmail.com) with any collaborative efforts to circulate A New-Net Manifesto 2017.

A New-Net Freedom Manifesto 2017
An Initiative Advocating Art Without Borders or Censorship

We network all web-lines of communication because we are networkers.
We revel in the process of multi-cultural collaboration.
We contribute as one among many for all.
We celebrate individuality, tolerance, decentralization, overcoming marginalization
We erase the central point
We counter central coordination
No oligarchies
No arbitrage
No corporate finance
Only free trade/free bARTer
We eradicate traditional boundaries of art, space and communication
We network art
We celebrate free mind and will
We metanetwork from I to WE
WE are NETWORKERS
Co-signed

1. Seiei Jack
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Sign, copy and distribute


Photo of György Galántai, Júlia Klaniczay, and Seiei Jack. Artpool, Budapest, 1994

Mail Art Chro No Logy

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