emailart – the Unprinted Page

As long as there is an international postal system, emailart will never wholly replace the sights and sensations of the postal experience, yet email, with its own distinct qualities and limitations, has become the vehicle of choice for a new wave of networking artists, and a vehicle of convenience for the old wave. The most obvious deficiency is emailart's lack of physical substance. Michael Lumb expresses the opinion of many mailartists, 'there is no substitute for the actual tactile object'. The fetishistic feel and smell of paper runs deep, but new media brings its own comforts and new allegiances.

In 2006, I had some email chats with Anna Banana about her frustration at receiving large email attachments that cause bottleneck congestion to people with dial-up internet connections. To some extent our inexperience with sending emails causes the problems - hitting a reply-to-all button or sending needlessly large images. And if we have a fast broadband connection, we tend to assume everyone else has one too. I was reminded of my 1980s soapbox days when mailart Tourism was becoming an expectation, and I tried to put the case for the shy retiring hermits who couldn't or didn't wish to play visitor and host. And when Ruud Janssen and others started using the internet for exchange, I wasn't online and began to feel just like Anna, that I was 'lost in the Dark Ages'. It took quite some time for internet access in the UK to become affordable.

Saving for Sending

Bates's Beginners Guide to emailart for mailartists would feature a plea to keep file sizes low, and the bottom line is smaller pictures and therefore less pixels. Unless you are specifically sending a high resolution image for printing large scale, your pictures will be comfortably viewable at 600 or 700 pixels wide. By saving images for screen at 72 dpi (dots per inch) or 96 dpi, the current resolution of monitors, you automatically bring down the number of pixels, the file size, and the transfer time. And luckily Photoshop does that for you with its 'Save for Web' option. Fireworks is also wonderful for getting smaller file sizes. By saving photographic and full-colour artwork in JPEG format (.jpg) you are also able to reduce file size by sacrificing a little quality. In Photoshop I find saving photographs at a Quality of 5 or 6 (medium) is usually fine on screen. In Fireworks a compression of 75% usually looks good. But beware of opening and re-saving your jpegs, this is a 'lossy' format, each time you re-compress your picture it will degrade and you will lose quality.

   

Both the Banana e-stamps above were saved as jpegs, but the first one, without any compression, is a chunky 172 kilobytes; the second one which doesn't look much different is 60% quality and measures only 14 kilobytes.

And I suppose the stamp should really have been saved as a gif. If you are saving line art or pictures with flat areas of colour, they look smoother in Compuserve GIF format (.gif). If photographs are saved as gifs they can look horribly stripey, but flat colour designs look great, and both Photoshop's 'Save for Web' option and Fireworks' optimize window let you see the quality before you save. Block colour designs that have been saved and re-saved as JPEGs often look spotty and speckly, but the GIF format is 'lossless' and does not degrade.

Internet

These days you just have to accept that unless you have access to the internet you're going to miss out on mail art calls, online documentation and direct email contacts. No point in bemoaning it. Now the big threshold is fast connections, broadband, and a technology obsessed with the moving image, on making smaller movie files. Currently, at least in the UK, we are at that 'tipping point' where dial-up connections are close to costing as much as high speed connections which have become much cheaper. The upshot is that people (inconsiderately but understandably) start to assume that recipients have speedy connections, weight of traffic increases, 'normal' file sizes get larger, and people with modem connections get 'nudged' into upgrading. It's either progress or a capitalist conspiracy.

Even with the newest equipment, however, email goes wrong at times, and in recent years many people have worried about the wisdom of accepting email attachments at all, the threat of viruses being ever-present. As a confirmed 'MacHead' I firmly believe you can limit the damage by buying a reliable system. So far at least, Macs have been less susceptible to virus attack than PCs. Apple supervise all their products, from operating system to hardware, and are keen to ensure that things work well together, especially in the area of art and design which Apple has championed. With PCs you have more companies, more variables, more possible mismatches. Yet whatever your system and set-up, email is not an exact science. Conflicts and malfunctions can affect everybody; there are some very unreliable email providers and some very inexperienced email users, so maybe it's not surprising that glitches occur. Perhaps we should remind ourselves that even posting a letter is not as reliable these days!