From Mail Art to Telepresence
Communication at a Distance in the Works of Paulo Bruscky and Eduardo Kac
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26512/vis.v14i2.20186Keywords:
Mail Art. Network Art. Telecommunication. Paulo Bruscky. Eduardo Kac.Abstract
This article examines the early works of Brazilian artists Paulo Bruscky and Eduardo Kac, as important precursors to art and activism on the Internet. It argues that their legacies of the 1970s and 1980s are significant in any node of the global cultural network. Both engaged art and communication at a distance: Bruscky in Recife in the 1970s, through Mail Art, and Kac in Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s, through videotext networks and telepresence events. Moreover, their conceptual practices resisted the political oppression of those decades by nurturing “the experimental exercise of freedom.”
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