I mentioned to Mouser that one of my hobbies is mail art and he said:
"I wonder if you would consider making a post on the forum telling
people about mail art? Sometimes this world can be a dreary place
-- it's important to open people's eyes to how folks are trying to
make it more interesting."
Sure! It's not only interesting, but Fun!
"What is mail art?"
Mail art is like pen pals with the added facet of trading art but also news, gabble, humor, photos and curiosities with friends all over the world.
How do people do mail art?
First, mail art is pretty much free of rules and commercialism
there are those who eschew modern/electronic/computer and do mail art the 'old-fashioned' way with scissors, paste, rubber stamps, pencil, ink, oils, aquarelle, etc. and some of these are accomplished graphic and/or textual artists. Some of these make faux postage stamps and have their own manual perforators.
Then there are those 'artists' such as myself who can't draw**.
**except organic chemical structures
and we are more into the abstract, aleatory and steal-and-alter school. That's why I found Screenshot Captor as a way to amass snapshots of Electric Sheep the screensaver.
And links:
What is mail art?:
http://www.dragonflydream.com/whatismailart.htmlIUOMA [The International Union Of Mail Artists]:
http://iuoma-network.ning.com/Ray Johnson [a famous practitioner]:
http://www.rayjohnsonestate.com/"Blaster" Al Ackerman [Loki reincarnated?] :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_Al_Ackerman ;
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22blaster+al+ackerman%22&lr=&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAWoVChMIsIj2mrD3xwIVEkGSCh0SIQvt&biw=1208&bih=547Musicmaster [he doodles, he declaims poetry, he's a mail artist]:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22musicmaster%22+mail+art%22&as_qdr=all&biw=1208&bih=547&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CB0QsARqFQoTCIvzsIm698cCFRUVkgodBgUC8Q#as_qdr=all&tbm=isch&q=%22musicmaster%22+mail+art