Critical Conversations: bridging pathways forward to greater understanding and creative solutions.

Pushing Past the Envelope: Visualizing the Mail-Art Network

Participatory, democratic, and unique, Mail Art is exchanged via the postal service, and facilitates creative connections among artists across the world. This art form arose as a way to work outside of “official” art distribution systems and over the decades amassed a loyal and productive network of participants.

In order to discover connections between the artists who sent and received this art form, I analyzed digitized collections of Mail Art from three digital collections in. Using web-scraped metadata, I compiled statistics on the most prolific participants, and created a network visualization of senders and recipients.

This project was presented at

InfoShow23, the annual showcase of student work. To view more about this project, please visit this project’s page on the InfoShow webpage.

work resembling an envelope, with clip art of a building in a trash bin, with the words mail art is not museum art, don't file it, use it, abuse it, shred it, wrap fish in it, give it to the gerbil written on the piece