School of the Museum of Fine Arts Text & Image Arts (TIA) 2005: Art from Ephemera (Mail Art and the Internet) is an intermediate level, multi-media studio class where students explore the distribution of images and text through network systems, creating art from ephemera in the form of hand-made mail art, as mass-produced printed material, and in digital format as e-mail art and blogs. Students are introduced to strategies of visual communication traditionally associated with Dada, Fluxus, and Mail Art movements. Our investigation progresses towards more recent approaches to these strategies that utilize digital technology and the Internet, both as a broadcast medium (one to many), as well as a system that enables new forms of emergent content (many to many). In this way, we consider the medium of the Internet from both aesthetic and conceptual perspectives.
