In one of my older statements I wrote about the 5 generations in mail-art. Somewhere in the 90-ies, and you can read in all on http://www.iuoma.org/stat_11.html and look at http://www.iuoma.org/overview.html to see where the other 18 statements were all about.
These 5 generations were described like this:
"Sometimes the mail artists are devided up into generations. The first generation: Ray Johnson who started in the NYCS with a selective group he choose to write to and asked them to play the game with him. Of course there is also the zero generation. Artists that already used the mail system for communication, art & play (Marcel Duchamp, Van Gogh maybe?) where individual artists were in contact with other artists through the mail in a creative way on a one-to-one basis. The second generation in the 60's - 70's when FLUXUS joined up and a selective group experimented with the mail system, the third generation where mail art rapidly grew in 70's - 80's because of the exhibitions and publications within the mail art network that spread the news to newcomers (this is where I joined the mail art network for the first time, and lots of the people I am still in contact with nowadays are from this 3rd generation. Also I had the luch to know mail-artists from the first and second generation). Not a limited group anymore, but the concept that anybody could take part and be a member of the mail art network really took shape. This lead to the Congress-year in 1986, where anybody could organize a congress, as long as two or more mail artists had a meeting at a certain place. The fourth generation, after the congress in 1986 organized by H.R. Fricker and Günther Ruch from Switserland, where the mail art population grew into a very large group. Every networker only knows his selective group with whom he/she is in contact. An enourmous wealth of projects and publications are made in the end of the 80's and the beginning of the 90's. The end of the 80's and the beginning 90's was also the gradual beginning of the fifth generation, where communication was done with the use of computers. Mark Bloch (USA), Charles François (Belgium) and me (in Holland) already were working with BBS's to send out electronic mail. One of the congresses in the DNC-year 1992 was done by Charles and me with a session of computer-congresses where we exchanged our thoughts without meeting. Our computers were our tools. In 1991 there was also the first networking-project REFLUX that uses the then elitair system of internet, but in 1994 till now the internet became a real option to communicate for the 'wealthy' countries."
I believe there is now the sixth generation of mail-artists. Instead of traditional mail-artists using the computer-systems for their communication there is now a generation growing up with computers and discovering the that there is a network that communicates by snail-mail in a creative way. The new generation associates mail with e-mail and only know the 'traditional mail' from bills, magazines and advertisings. This new generation communicates electronically as a natural thing and discover the feeling of mail-art in the hand only secondly after seeing in on the Internet. This is also the generation that does electronic projects and published the results on the Internet. A hardcopy version isn't always made. Is this still mail-art? Is it communication-art? The older generations are dying out. Mail-art becomes something new for each next generation.
Ruud
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