Mailing lists are dead, long live mailing lists! — periodising discourses, debates and infrastructures of nettime, empyre, spectre and crumb

Abstract

While contemporary social media have been critiqued for their ephemeral effects on media arts, curatorial practices, and activist politics, the mailing list has proven an enduring venue for geographically dispersed communities and individuals to participate and remain in dialog over the course of decades. Lists such as nettime, empyre, spectre and crumb have played host to a community of artists, critics, curators, activists, and academics, helping to launch or establish the careers of numerous prominent figures in related fields. In spite of their historical significance, however, the currency of these mailing lists (and mailing lists in general) seems to have substantially diminished over the last decade with the advent of corporate social media. Based on empirical studies we conducted on these lists, this paper argues that nettime, empyre, spectre and crumb, as well as mailing lists as discursive infrastructure, although being understudied, are objects worthy of inquiry and of particular interest for the field of media art history. In the paper, we present our analysis of these lists’ respective archives, which span almost two decades, periodising the discourses, cohorts, and events that have taken place on these lists with the aim of contributing original historiographical research into debates and issues in contemporary media art. Methodologically, the study addresses questions of how to write mailing lists historiographies, and argues that, from the perspective of the future, legacy systems, such as open crawlable mailing lists (GNU Mailman, Pipermail, Listserv, MHonArc, etc.), may retrospectively provide a more lasting historical record of digital culture than today's all enveloping corporate-guarded social media.