Tag Archives: mail art

All my love Marni – Postcard

MorgueGallery.com will mail you a signed postcard that has been recycled by Peter Bright, each postcard is different and variations of this image have appeared in exhibitions all over Europe and the USA.

To receive your postcard click the button below – the £1.00 is to cover postage etc.

Originally this recycled postcard was a promo for ‘Cassette Culture‘ a download album from This Window which was released in 2009 (which is available on iTunes etc). The photograph is of Marni De Much, the drummer on the ‘Morgue Studio Demos’ limited edition This Window CDR release.

Example: Art Kitchen (USA) – February 2012

The postcard below at was exhibited at The Alabama Art Kitchen (An Art Collective) 2626 University Blvd. Tuscaloosa, AL 35401, USA, during February 2012.

The mission statement of the Alabama Art Kitchen is to provide studio space and equipment for local artists – as well as provide a venue for exhibitions, classes and workshops. They are committed to nurturing creativity, volunteerism and access to the art experience, to increase the interest and involvement of the local Tuscaloosa arts community

The ‘audio artist’ had to rethink the whole creative process

How do you make something that has two physical sides have no sides at all?

Compact Cassettes, were the way that home recording artists distributed their ART. Cassettes consisted of two miniature spools, between which magnetically coated plastic tape was passed and wound between them. These spools and other mechanical (physical) parts were contained and supported inside a protective plastic shell. Two stereo pairs of tracks (four in total) or two monaural analog audio tracks could be recorded onto this fragile tape; one stereo pair or one monophonic track is played or recorded when the tape is moving in one direction and the second pair when moving in the other direction – thus creating two sides. Cassettes produced a lot of ‘hiss’ and were a very poor method of archiving and storing audio. The trick was to get as much recorded volume onto the magnetic surface with out making the ‘music’ distort.

With the conception of downloading audio, the ‘audio artist’ had to rethink the whole creative process.

This is probably my most favorite This Window cassette release. http://www.thiswindow.org/ex1.html

Released in 1989 on a Belgian label it was remixed and is available at most retail download stores. It was always meant to be a composition of two halves – side A and side B but neither CDs or mp3s have sides. The remixes have been split into four sections and when played randomly on a player manage to work. The original concept of two halves has now become one of many plausible combinations – how weird is that? – When it was conceived (by four naked people in a bath) this was not an option.

See This Window the pseudonym of Peter Bright.

Cassette Culture was an ART network (thiswindow.org)
What do you do and how do you get people to buy your stuff if you own an online store? Creating a focal point online that is memorable, is important to your Art business (or any business) and vital in perpetuating all the hard work you have done with your website’s creation. Read more: http://technorati.com/lifestyle/article/do-people-make-impulse-art-purchases/#ixzz1qOsIxeva
Compact Cassette. (2012, March 27). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 09:33, March 28, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Compact_Cassette&oldid=484223545

Mail Art

Another postcard to Hungary

This is another recycled postcard I sent to a project

Postcard recycled (m4tr.co.uk)
Landscapes at Speed (peterbright.info)

Nude Olympia and Green Hosting

There is a link between Art and Business – the processes of realizing an artwork and a product are very similar. We can install, manage an…

“extended definition of art”

Joseph Beuys (May 12, 1921 – January 23, 1986) was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.

Image via Wikipedia

His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his “extended definition of art” and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by passionate, even acrimonious public debate, but he is now regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

Mailart in many respects pushes the boundaries of what can be considered art, it has a surreal or Dada quality about it. Mail art sometimes reaches the mainstream gallery audiences but never really reaches the greater highs. Good mail art would not look out of place next to exhibitions like the Joseph Beuys exhibition in Cardiff.

Mail art is a worldwide art and music movement that began in the early 1960s. the principle is simple you send visual art (but also music, sound art, poetry, etc.) through the international postal system. Mail Art is sometimes known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art. Mail Art is a network, based on the principles of barter and equal one-to-one collaboration.

After a peak in popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Mail Art phenomenon has gradually migrated to the Internet, whose “social networks” were largely anticipated and predicted by the interactive processes of postal collaborations. Nevertheless, Mail Art is still practiced by a loose planetary community involving thousands of mailartists from the most varied backgrounds.

International Union of Mail-Artists – IUOMA (thiswindow.org)
Art by mail or mail art? (sitemaps-xml.com)
Exeter business – green web deal (sitemaps-xml.com)

IUOMA – music and art

Mail-Artist since:: 1986

My Website:: http://www.thiswindow.org

Why I am involved in Mail-Art:

Was involved in the cassette / music side of mailart in the 1980’s /90’s. The whole idea of a network of artists connected by the postal system appealed to me and was an antidote to the stranglehold the ‘Art / Music’ establishment had over my creativity.

I have always considered mailart to be one of the major unsung heroes of Art History and every effort should be made to raise its profile.

Here are a few network related things I have done this millennium. http://www.thiswindow.org/Mail_Art/?cat=3

From profile page on: International Union of Mail-Artists – IUOMA

There is a brief retrospective interview looking back at the early days and the origins of ‘This Window’ in the November 2009 issue of ‘The Living Archive of Underground Music’.

“I think my first exposure to Peter Bright’s This Window project came with this tape on the IRRE label from Germany. Peppered with experimentalism and a sense of wander and wonder” Don Campau – Read more…

The early experiences of the audio mail art scene by Peter Bright (artist, This Window)

Published on: ‘The Living Archive of Underground Music‘

If you sat me down and asked me what were the main reasons for getting involved in this emotionally draining and sometimes very unrewarding ARTFORM called ‘home taping’, then I would say two things:

In the early 1970’s when I was about 13 or 14 years old I loved ‘Motown’ and ‘Led Zeppelin’ (my music tastes were very eclectic). In the UK there was a TV show called ‘Top of the Pops’, which shaped the adolescent pop culture. The stars appeared on a Thursday night and lip-synched to their hits. Then one night (1972) a band called ‘Roxy Music’ appeared and turned the whole thing on its head. I can still see the performance in my mind’s eye. I had suddenly been exposed to ‘Art School Rock’. They were remarkably radical, different musically and visually.
Around the same time (1973) an album was released on ‘Virgin Records’ called ‘The Faust Tapes’. This was a marketing experiment which had a retail price of 49 pence (UK) – so lots of people bought it and a lot of people threw it into the trash. The German band Faust were without a record deal and their producer Uwe Nettlebeck gave these tapes to Virgin for free. These apparently thrown together bits of tape noises, sounds, songs etc. were all mangled together – well, that is what most people thought. In reality it was an exceptionally well crafted piece of work and was the inspiration for my EEtapes release ‘Extraction’ in 1989.

These two things combined with going to Art School eventually got me involved in experimenting with recorded sound. The first machines I used were a Phillips reel to reel and a budget priced cassette recorder.

Peter Bright – Printmaker, Artist, Musician

(aka This Window)….Just another blog….my art and my disease