Scope and Contents Back cover: The experimental art and poetry of the last half of the twentieth century offers a glimpse of the emerging networked culture that electronic devices will make omnipresent. Craig J. Saper demarcates this new genre of networked art, which uses the trappings of bureaucratic systems-money, logos, corporate names, stamps-to create intimate situations among the participants. In Saper's analysis, the pleasures that these aesthetic situations afford include shared special knowledge or new language among small groups of participants. Functioning as artworks in themselves, these temporary institutional structures-networks, publications, and collective works-give rise to a gift-exchange community as an alternative economy and social system. Saper explains how this genre developed from post-World War II conceptual art, including periodicals as artworks in themselves; lettrist, concrete, and process poetry; Bauhaus versus COBRA; Fluxus publications, kits, and machines; mail art and...

Scope and Contents Craig Saper curated this exhibition through loan of "Assemblings" entirely from the Sackner Archive. It might have been the largest exhibition of assemblings in a gallery space to date. His extensive essay describes the history of this international, alternative distribution system with its roots in Fluxus, Lettrisme, Situationism, Conceptualism and Cobra. Circumventing the established art gallery system, bookmakers, artists, visual poets, media artists send from 50 to 100 works to an assembler or compiler who distributes the assemblings to the participants and to subscribers. Worldwide networking systems developed, basically using the postal system and a few avant garde institutions, in an attempt to reach a wide audience and democratize art making. Assemblings combine both crafts and mechanized reproduction. Saper writes, "The artists cherish the production of carefully constructed individualized visual poems and constructions as well as the insistence that readers recuperate,...

Scope and Contents Craig Saper curated this exhibition through loan of "Assemblings" entirely from the Sackner Archive. It might have been the largest exhibition of assemblings in a gallery space to date. His extensive essay describes the history of this international, alternative distribution system with its roots in Fluxus, Lettrisme, Situationism, Conceptualism and Cobra. Circumventing the established art gallery system, bookmakers, artists, visual poets, media artists send from 50 to 100 works to an assembler or compiler who distributes the assemblings to the participants and to subscribers. Worldwide networking systems developed, basically using the postal system and a few avant garde institutions, in an attempt to reach a wide audience and democratize art making. Assemblings combine both crafts and mechanized reproduction. Saper writes, "The artists cherish the production of carefully constructed individualized visual poems and constructions as well as the insistence that readers recuperate,...

Scope and Contents Craig Saper curated this exhibition through loan of "Assemblings" entirely from the Sackner Archive. It might have been the largest exhibition of assemblings in a gallery space to date. His extensive essay describes the history of this international, alternative distribution system with its roots in Fluxus, Lettrisme, Situationism, Conceptualism and Cobra. Circumventing the established art gallery system, bookmakers, artists, visual poets, media artists send from 50 to 100 works to an assembler or compiler who distributes the assemblings to the participants and to subscribers. Worldwide networking systems developed, basically using the postal system and a few avant garde institutions, in an attempt to reach a wide audience and democratize art making. Assemblings combine both crafts and mechanized reproduction. Saper writes, "The artists cherish the production of carefully constructed individualized visual poems and constructions as well as the insistence that readers recuperate,...