Chuck Welch

He wrote "Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology", with a foreword by Ken Friedman, which was published and edited by University of Calgary Press in 1995.

[1] The Eternal Network and the Crackerjack Kid were mentioned in a review of mail art titled "Pushing the Envelope" in 2001,[2] and the archivist and curator Judith Hoffberg wrote about him in her publication Umbrella.

Conversely, others like Kornelia Röder, the co-editor of East Europe in International Network, explain the movement in political terms.

Matt Ferranto quoted Welch in reference to the medium's usual revolutionary stance and its art historical importance, "Mail art…(is) based on principles of free exchange and international access to all people, regardless of nationality, race, or creed," says Chuck Welch, who also calls it "a democratic based forum existing outside traditional art systems.

Degree at Boston Museum School and Tufts University, Welch began investigating the possibility of establishing a mail art presence on the global internet.

In 1989, while at Dartmouth College, Welch frequented the Kiewit Computation Center where he learned HTML and established a direct bridge between the Internet (switched packet systems) and the analog mail art network.

[15] Claire Voon said of Telenetlink, "The project naturally considers and is informed by the history of mail art, which emerged in the 1950s and ’60s from the Fluxus movement.

Email art itself isn’t a novel concept, with roots in the 1990s: Chuck Welch, for one, who was part of Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School, was exploring connections between physical mail and the internet in his project Telenetlink.

[16] Hungarian critic and theoretician Géza Perneczky wrote in THE MAGAZINE NETWORK that "milestones were set up in the field of telecommunication 'host systems" including Welch's "Telenetlink" (1991).

Perneczky added, "Undeniably, Welch's initiative should be considered the most advanced link between the mail art network and the Global Telematic Community".