Turyzm – sztuka poczty w wersji 2.0
Tourism - the art of e-mail in version 2.0

Summary/Abstract: Tourism was an important though not very well recognized episode in mail art movement. Initiated by Hans Rudi Fricker and Günther Ruch in 1986, it encouraged mail artists to meet each other in a series of more than 80 congresses which were arranged within the International Mailart Congress. The idea of tourism was based on the need for establishing personal contacts between mail artists, dispersed all over the world. The paper analyzes the impact of tourism and its current reception. Is tourism a utopian idea or is it a forecast of the need for interactivity, expressed today in Web 2.0 numerous applications? Is it also a coincidence that the call for tourism was in mid-eighties, when the fall of Iron Curtain was soon to happen and the urgency of global communication was in the air. The first mail art congress, where the idea of tourism was presented, was at the same time, the last “analogue” one. The next one involved the emerging medium of the Internet, which has changed the relation between art and communication. The most important features of mail art, which was in 70s, described as correspondence art, have shifted from correspondence and a distant contact, to networking, which meant a closer alliance and a different structure. The change from mail art to networking had profound consequences for all the movement, based on communication and collaboration within a postal system. They may be compared to the current change from Web 1.0 as a social phenomenon, to the 2.0 version, with its possibilities of instant interaction and a unique balance between dispersal and unity.

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