Hello everyone, I wanted to ask the artists in the subreddit about how the art scene was before the Internet came along!
To my understanding, a vast majority migrated to the Internet because of ease of access and less restrictions. But it's got me really wondering how popular Usenet was with artists and what was different.
I couldn't find much online about the artist experience before the internet, specifically with Usenet
Back in the day, usenet was mostly text based. Sure you could probably get some ftp sites from it. But nothing was integrated like it is now. You'd need to manually copy/paste to a different app.
Also a lot of interface was very low resolution. 640x480 if you were lucky. (Standard vga). So I seriously doubt anyone was using the internet for visual art until probably the 2000s, when higher res started to be more mainstream and apps started getting integrated.
There was probably some "8 bit" style art flying around and a lot more effort went into ASCII art back then.
Sound/video art: again, not really until people started realising they could do binaries in the 90s. Sculpture hasn't really even started yet, 3d printing is still too niche.
(I started in about 94 and saw very little non ascii content, but maybe that was just my provider not having the groups. Www was just about kicking off then.)
Technically, entirely text based, even for binaries, since binaries could only be uploaded after being converted to text using uuencode, yenc, etc.
Usenet is an Internet service. It does not pre-date the Internet
There's probably nothing to find
Well, it does. It ran on UUCP in 1979, before TCP/IP was developed. Modern access to usenet is over internet services, sure - but usenet does predate that.
That said, Im not sure what art specifically there might have been, shared via text files between university computers.
Depends on what you count as the internet.
Many think the internet is the web, so to them the internet is from around 95.
To me the internet is from when different university nets got connected together and to some its from when the ip protocol was invented.
I suspect that with the lack of a formal standard of what was officially the Internet, the appropriate definition is likely contextual and subjective. Personally I shy away from labelling NSFNET and the various X.25 networks as being "the Internet", and I do like Wikipedia's current lede for the Internet article, which describes the Internet as "...the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices." Naturally with this particular definition, usenet predates Internet. If you define the Internet as being the first inter-connection of any networks of any nature, then it clearly would not.
I suppose I don't see much value in such a loose definition, but surely someone somewhere would see something I'm missing there - some niche use.
If you're talking about the art scene as in the computer art scene -- but before the world wide web -- you might want to check out a few episodes of the BBS documentary episode on the art scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bnxp14wVycQ