Intimate Bureaucracies & Infrastructuralism: A Networked Introduction to Assemblings

While comparing the Web to a medium like film or video makes it difficult to examine this type of social-aesthetic interplay, comparing the Web to assemblings and mail-art networks helps to highlight this interplay. Because the alternative artists' networks examine the same fears and hopes found in many descriptions of the information super-highway, we can learn about the electronic web's potential from studying the assemblings' codes. 4. Chuck Welch estimates the number of mail-art participants at around six thousand in 1993; that number does not include the many more who buy 'zines at newsstands. Because these magazines inherently offer a forum for discussions about this type of work, much of the secondary literature resides within the community of these artists.