KF: E-mail is easier to archive than snail mail. Paper builds up ... books, letters, files. There's never enough time to file and organize. E-mail is easy. It shows up on my screen. My computer is well-organized and filed because it's easy to handle everything sitting at the keyboard. There's no need to find a file or shelf space or to move around the room sorting and seeking. If I want to save e-mail, which I often do, I copy and paste it into a word processor file. Sometimes there's a reason to make a paper copy. When I do, it gets lost with all the other paper. The electronic copy is easy to find. It's right on the computer where I left it.

RJ: How much do you know about computers?

KF: Very little, really. I use a Macintosh because it works the way I do. Computers are a powerful, sophisticated tool. Now are they becoming smart enough to be useful to most people for most jobs. The breakthrough came with the Mac.

I started using Mac in 1988 when the Mac got smart enough to handle big jobs, including serious design work. A client wanted me to create a design program his staff could use for internally-generated publications. I went to his office to help him draw up the design. He showed me how easy it was to use Aldus PageMaker andMicrosoft Word to do it myself. It took about two or three hours of coaching and then I was working productively. There are people who are excited about what they call computer literacy. Not me. I want the tool to be smart enough to do what I need it to do with minimum special skills on my part. I've done some research and publishing on the ways that the new information will affect society and culture, but I've focused specifically on the human and behavioral effects of information, not on information technology or information processing. Would you like to read the chapter that I've written for a new book on the subject just published by Scandinavian University Press? The title is: Information Science: From the Development of the Discipline to Social Interaction. My chapter focused on social interaction. It won't tell you too much about my ideas about computers. I don't have that many ideas about computers. It will tell you what I think about what computers mean for the rest of us.

RJ: Since I work with computers it would be interesting for me to read, but probably not for all readers of this interview. At the moment, with Internet, it is also possible to publish your texts in a digital form. Is this something you would like to do?

KF: Absolutely. Internet and computers make it possible to transact enormous amounts of valuable information on a useful and selective basis without paying to overproduce. Unlike books, you don't need a minimum number of orders to break even. That means individual thinkers with proper technical support can publish as easily as best-selling authors. Nam June Paik predicted the information super highway years ago. He even created the name! Fluxus, mail art and Internet go back to the beginning, before the beginning. Narrowcasting and narrowcast publishing on the net are new version of Nam June's Utopian Laser Television. Before long, computers with small cameras and optical fiber cable will be so common that we'll be able to set up our own television cable broadcasts, the true realization Utopian Laser Television.

Thanks to Nam June, I've been publishing on-line for since last year. When Nam June organized the New York - Seoul Fluxus Festival, he arranged a web site where our work was available on-line. In typical mail art fashion, I'll brag about being first to say that Nam June's show was the first on-line art exhibition. I presented some scores. Now, Joe De Marco is developing a major on-line web site for Fluxus. There are scores, art works, and there will later be documents, texts, historical material. Joe has been in touch with historians like Owen Smith and he's getting in touch with major collections and archives. He hopes to put up a Fluxus archive and museum on the site. There will also be pages for work by individual artists. The Fluxus Home page is [http://www.cinenet.net:80/~marco/fluxus/]. We already have The Fluxus Performance Workbook on-line. Interested people can visit the site to browse, copy and download scores by Ay-O, Genpei Akasegawa, Eric Andersen, Robert Bozzi, George Brecht, Albert M Fine, Ken Friedman, Lee Heflin, Hi Red Center, Dick Higgins, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Joe Jones, Bengtaf Klintberg, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, George Maciunas, Richard Maxfield, Larry Miller, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Tomas Schmit, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts and Emmett Williams. The workbook was planned in 1987 or so. I edited it. It was published by Guttorm Nordø, a Norwegian artist who has been active in mail art. It took almost four years to raise the money and publish the workbook. It took about four days between the time Joe De Marco contacted me and the time it was ready to use on the net. You can also find Dick Higgins's Cowboy Plays on the Fluxus Home Page and there's lots more to come.

The most use I make of Internet involves scholarly research and communication. I recently completed a survey using Internet. It took me a few weeks to compile the empirical data at a cost of a few hundred kroner. Before Internet, the same survey would have taken months of work and cost at least twenty times as much. Getting decent results, stimulating people to answer the questions and engaging their inte rest still requires training and skill. Writing is still writing. But the Internet is a great tool. If you have organization, research and writing skills, every step of the physical process is more simple and the costs go down. Just a few minutes before you sent me the last question, I released the on-line pre-print of a study titled Books in the Age of On-Line Information: Will We Read Fewer or More Books? Statistical Sum mary and Preliminary Conclusions. The Norwegian School of Management will publish the working paper next month. People can get it on e-mail request and decide if they want the working paper by snail mail. Everything just moves faster and more effectively. (A few weeks after this questions and answer took place, the study was published as a special report by the American Association of Higher Education. The study was also discussed in the "Cyberscape" column of the International Herald Tribune on Monday, December 4, 1995.)

RJ: Speed is a relative thing. I'm not referring to Einstein's theory. I've noticed that if one can do things more quickly with computers, one starts to do more work in the same time, makes new tasks for oneself in the free time that is given through the use of the computer. Communication used to be a slow process. All technological advances speed up the communication process. This results in more communication, but only for those who have access to the technology. Isn't this scary?

KF: There are two issues embedded in your question. The first issue is that we do more work in the same time. That's not scary to me. The second is that we face the challenge of a world of unequal access to information. That frightens me for many reasons. If you want me to go into it, I will, but to do so, I've got to consider political economics and closely reasoned argument. It's up to you if you think the readers of a mail art dialogue will find that interesting. Let's consider the first issue, the speed of work. I'm happy for the gains in speed. I love to work. The computer enables me to be more productive as a researcher and writer. The information superhighway enables me to travel farther, to gather information faster and more effectively. My one problem with the infobahn is that it's poorly organized. The structure is frequently confusing and uninformative. We'll see things improve vastly in the next three or four years.

Poor structure is annoying to me. New ways of solving problems, new ways of accessing and organizing information, new structures that emerge from the flow of information should, in theory, permit us to address and use the power of questions more effectively. The ability to work with more kinds of information across broad ranges of time and space and the opportunity to seek information from more sources make it possible for users to work in different ways than were previously possible. Some of these ways are more effective, some are less. Those who have had to work with remote libraries and closed-stack systems find the new information technology a tremendous opportunity. In some ways, it is not much different than the libraries they have been using except that it places access control in their hands. In some ways, it is superior: it puts a vast amount of information and the contents of many documents directly on their desk with far less waiting time than was required when ordering through a library.

Those who have had the opportunity to work in major, open-stack libraries may find the new information technology something of a lateral move. An effective information user with field-specific expertise and solid general reference skills can navigate a multi-million volume library and make use of the materials far more effectively than is yet possible through the new technology. The difference is simple. A good, large-scale library permits effective browsing and grazing as well as hunting. The physical medium of the book and the way libraries organize books near one another allows rapid access to the domain of what one does not know that one does not know. This allows one to ask general, open-ended questions in a wide variety of ways. While the information superhighway is loaded with documents and ways of finding material that can be surprising and serendipitous, finding useful connections to expert sources can also be surprisingly hard. The infobahn isn't indexed very well. Developing effective indexing and abstracting systems has always been a key problem for information. This is also true for the medium of physical books and documents in paper-technology libraries. The difference is that physical artifacts present themselves organized in some way that rapidly begins to make sense to the user. As a result, the intelligent information user soon structures a conceptual library access pattern. This pattern is an information overlay and navigation chart that becomes an operating system for a multi-million volume paper analog information network. Few information users can master the conceptual content of the Internet. It is possible to master the structure and understand the basic content of a physical library. It simply takes examination, practice and footwork. The Internet is too big, and undergoes too much rapid change to make that kind of mastery possible. Good indexes and abstracts together with good links and pointers will be the only way most people can master the conceptual content of the Internet. There's a big difference between being afraid and being annoyed. As these problems are solved, I will welcome the improvements. If I want to work more, it's fine. If I just want to do more in the same time, it's fine. I may want to do less and use the time in other ways. We have choices. I've been thinking about these questions for a week now, the week since I released my preprint report. It's been an exciting, productive week. I was able to do more work and better work in less time at lower cost. Within three or four days of my preprint getting out, I've had requests for copies from nearly two hundred scholars and researchers in over twenty nations around the world, including people I didn't meet or contact through the original study. Major international magazines and newspapers have contacted me asking for copies. The American Association for Higher Education asked to publish the preprint on their Web Site. I'm finally beginning to understand why the physical scientists who have used Internet have been so much more productive and resourceful than social scientists or humanists. It's impossible to describe the profound difference in productivity this technology permits. It allows teams, it allows for sharing, it allows people who ought to be thinking and working together despite great distances to do so. It's one thing to read about something in a magazine and think, "Yeah, that's a good idea." It's a another to do it. When you work this way, you understand why this technology is a major development in our ability to serve each other. Information technology is the first significant technology that enables us to increase our standard of living while reducing our material resources consumption. That, for better or worse, brings us to your second question. Do you really want my thoughts?

RJ: The problem of access to this digital superhighway is obvious. You have to live in a country with the infrastructure for Internet, you need to have access to a computer, you need to have the money for an account subscription and the phone. I enjoy the possibilities of this new tool because I live in a rich country with the infrastructure and economy to make this possible. The government in Holland also sponsors servers that make Internet access and e-mail cheap, too. I am interested in your thoughts about unequal access to information. Many mail artists see Internet as a next step for mail artists, the newest way to communicate.

KF: There are two issues to consider. I'll take the simple one first. Most mail artists don't understand what Internet is good for. I'm not speaking in a technological sense. I'm speaking in terms of culture and communication. Mail art has hardly ever been about broad communication. It's based on small town culture writ large. The mail art network is insular, internalized, self-centered. There's little understanding of history and culture, even little knowledge about the history of mail art. The idea of artists who think this way using Internet as a new way to communicate is a joke. The results aren't interesting.

Mail art has become boring. Mail art mottoes don't disguise the fact that mail artists are in many ways a social club. They're like any other club. We don't ascribe any kind of great value to groups of pen-pals or people who visit each other across borders. What would we think if a group of pen-pals claimed to be changing history, revolutionizing art and advancing human progress? Tourism? Networker conferences? The Scouts have been doing it for a century.

Mail art will remain a disappointment without a richer foundation in knowledge, culture and communication theory. The effects of the information society and the knowledge economy are revolutionizing the world. Mail artists haven't recognized the nature of those changes. They're working out of old paradigms that don't make sense today. Perhaps mail art and correspondence art were revolutionary in the 1960s. The world was different. In that distant and more primitive world, mail art was startling and innovative. Mail art had already become self-centered and internalized by the 1970s. The world was shaking. The Cold War was still on but change was in the air. Mail artists were still doing the same old thing, sending the same old messages back and forth to each other. I got into big trouble with a series of essays and pamphlets titled Freedom, Excellence and Choice. I became an outcast in the mail art community. I was startled by the nasty letters and hate cards that I got. I had pursued the same agenda from the start. The network was irritated over the same philosophy and ideas that put me at odds with the art world and gave birth to many of the mail art media now in use. By the 1970s, pursuing those ideas in a thoughtful and critical way put me at odds with the mail art network.

Mail art has no major role to play in the world today. There's no need for mail art on the Internet. The net's a different kind of medium. It needs play, ideas and exchange. It doesn't need mail art. People who see the Internet as an arena for mail art are missing the point. Information technology has opened old fields to entirely new approaches. The technology is helping us to transform information into knowledge by making it possible to work and play in new ways. The information society is shifting the boundaries of most professions, transforming job descriptions and reconstructing businesses. It would be amazing art were to be left untouched.

The world has moved farther than mail art has. The old paradigms don't hold. Mail artists make too much of their supposedly radical nature without a solid grounding in common human issues. Radical artistic efforts that react against vanished paradigms seem quaint, irrelevant.

RJ: And the second answer, the difficult one?

KF: The second question is extraordinarily difficult. The idea that part of the world will have access to information technology while much of it won't is profoundly disturbing. If the developed world leaves the rest of the world behind, we'll have to build a huge wall to keep out the billions of people who want what we have. That won't work. On the other hand, shaping sustainable development for everyone is a huge problem, just huge.

The flow of information through societies, through organizations, through companies can make a profound difference. But things are difficult. We must make things work in an interlocked system of public policies, business policies and private desires that are headed in directions that don't lead toward the world we need to shape. I am convinced of the importance of these issues and aware of the extraordinary challenges that face us if we are to achieve enough in the next half century for the human race to survive on this planet.

The flow of information and the development of a good life for all are linked. The development of a good life for all with sustainable development is not the altruism of the rich for the poor, but a key to a good future for everyone. This excites me more than mail art. Back in the 1960s, it was possible to believe that art and the postal system could reshape the world.

To some degree, it was possible then. Those challenges excited me when they seemed possible. It was always kind of a dream, but it was a useful dream. Today, other dreams are more productive.

RJ: I think this is a good place to end the interview. Thank you for your time and energy !

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