Equally adept at art and architecture as he is with computers, Ray Lauzzana founded fineArt forum, the Internet arts and technology bulletin board/newsletter with the longest history.

Please recap for us how you came to found fAf.
I'm both honoured and distressed to reflect on the origins of fineArt forum. Honoured by the recognition that it's matured to the point that people are interested in how it all began, but distressed by the fact that its origins are in the sort of mythology that seems to wrap itself around things as time passes.

As with almost everything in my life, fineArt forum had extremely humble beginnings and had precedents and predecessor projects.

fineArt forum was not the first project of this type on which I had worked. In fact, global networking seems to have been an obsession of mine for quite a while. The earliest project I can remember was “One World Macrame”, which I did while a graduate student in 1970 at CCAC, California College of Art & Crafts, Oakland, California. This project was a poem and performance dealing with the notion of tying things together. The poem/performance begins considering string as a linear material that can project a curvilinear line in space and can be tied to other strings to form a net/macrame/network. The piece continues through 'balls of string' and other materials, such as wire that can be used bind things together and conclude with a refrain or appeal to “tie it together”. The final stanza concludes “not to worry, it's already done. The phone company did it.”

This and my work in various computer software companies in California set the stage for the development of fineArt forum. In 1986, I returned to Amherst to take a professorship in the Art Department. My task was to establish a Computer Graphics curriculum within the context of the Fine Arts. The PCs had just come out; there were no Macs; and the hottest personal boxes were UNIX-based. With some grants from Digital Equipment and help from the Electrical Engineering Department, I set a UNIX-based local area network in the Art Department. The courses included Electronic Still Photography, which used remote scanners in the Astronomy Department to capture images, and we jerry-rigged recorders using 35mm cameras and a high-resolution monitor. All of this would not have been possible had the underpinnings of what was called Edunet not been in place.

In 1982, an initiative from NSF was begun to integrate the various university networks into a single system based on DARPA net, the US Defense Department's network.

The initial phases of the project went under the pseudonym ARPAnet and were dedicated to scientific research. Within a few years it became apparent that the notion of scientific research encompassed all of the known information in the universe, and thus Edunet was born with a much broader mandate that allowed 'non-scientific' university departments to get connected. It was at this time, that I was asked to teach 3-Dimensional Design.

As a junior professor, I was required to teach some of the introductory/foundation courses. I had been teaching 2D and Color, which I felt comfortable with and I thought that I knew what I was doing. But one semester I was asked to teach 3D Design and I felt like the proverbial 'fish-out-of-water'. I had studied architecture, in fact I'm still studying architecture. But my personal work and sensibilities had always focussed on the two-dimensional arts, ie. printmaking, painting, photography, etc.

I just felt foolish talking about ideas like 'massing' which I really do not have a good sense of. In addition, the students had an expectation that somehow 3D with me would mean 3D with computers. I found 3D CAD abysmally boring, and very 2D, so … I reached into my kit bag of experiences and came up with the idea of working with the planet as a three-dimensional object and design events/projects that would capture a global presence.

I had all sorts of mailing lists from various projects that I had worked on in the past, and the first project which I set for the students was a “Mail Art” event in which they cut one of the 2D Designs into pieces and mailed the pieces to various people around the planet, requesting that the recipient send them a piece of their art. The response was tremendous. Within weeks, little works of art from around the world started arriving. We set up a map of the world and pinned the works on the place where they came from. This continued throughout the semester. In fact, I received correspondence, years later, asking whatever happened to that “art exchange” project.

Meanwhile back at the local area network, the student e-mail system was finally up and running. Our first project on the system was a chain-letter poem, which circulated in the class and eventually got mailed off-campus, taking on a life of its own.

In the discussions in class regarding the differences between mail and email, we began to evolve the idea of email-art, and thus fineArt forum was born.

What kind of any difficulties did you face getting it started?
At the time there were no bulletin boards. Listservers were relatively new technology and there were many different approaches to the idea of email mailing lists. There were no search engines on which to announce fineArt forum. So, the knowledge of its existence was spread by word-of-mouth and the postal service.

Having made friends with various publishers over the years, it was easy to get our press releases placed in quite a number of art magazines. The classroom turned into a strange sort of propaganda machine, as students began sending out announcements to the media about something that was almost not there at all. In fact, all that existed was correspondence about how it would work, if it did work, which was merged together and sent back to everyone who had made a comment about it.

Initially, we simply used the .cc (carbon copy) facility in UNIX mail to redistribute the newsletter. After six months, we had home-brewed a listserver and were off and running.

By the end of the first year, we had 700 subscribers and the list was growing. We now had announcements of events worldwide, as well as several intercontinental discussions going on.

How did fAf grow from there?
It was becoming apparent that a more physical reality and maybe some paid staff would go a long way. Enter Roger Malina, Leonardo and the International Society for Art, Science & Technology, ISAST. With two work-study students and a full-time Leonardo staff person, things became more real and we began publishing fAf in print. This only lasted for about six months.

Even though the community of artists that had an Internet connection was extremely small, the community was growing rapidly. Publishing fAf in print, however, turned out to be a step in the wrong direction. Luckily, I was to pass the managerial responsibilities to someone in tune with the generation of networking about to be born, namely Paul Brown.

In 1989 I moved to the Netherlands to teach at HKU and develop their Interactive Art Curriculum. When I first got there, although the local network of Macs was tremendous, Internet accessibility was extremely limited, ie. ultra limited dial-in capability. This made it extremely difficult to publish fAf, and therefore it was transferred initially to ISAST/Leonardo (Roger Malina) and in 1992 to Paul Brown at Mississippi State University. When I returned to the States in 1993, Paul had done a wonderful job of integrating fAf into the WWW which had just become enabled via Mosaic.

Now, fineArt forum is going into a new phase. Having moved from the US to Holland, back to the US and then to Australia, it's now being transferred to Nisar Keshvani in Singapore. All of my best wishes go out to him as he embarks on this endeavour and takes up the challenges that surely will present themselves as the forum moves into the future.

Speaking of the future, what do you see as fAf's role then and how it should serve the new media/art/technology community?

I'm not at all sure that I have any meaningful advice to give. All I know is that you shouldn't expect things to turn out the way you expect.

Hopefully, the future of the web will be rich with works that overcome the chauvinism and myopic visions of e-commerce.

The web has given a voice to international 'special-interest' groups. But their voices need to be strengthened at every opportunity, so that they are not drowned out by the din of advertising coming from the multinational corporations and fly-by-night start-up companies that are eating up the bandwidth.

Whatever the future holds, my only suggestion to Internet artists of the future is "Keep your bailing wire, rubber bands, hairpins and chewing gum at the ready. You'll need to make up stuff out of even thinner air in the future."

Biography
Ray Lauzzana is publisher of the International Directory of Design, a 12-volume directory of schools, professional societies and periodical publications that cover a disciplines as diverse as architecture and video. From 1994, he was Editor-in-Chief of Languages of Design, which is an international journal concerned with formal methods for generating images, text and audio. He founded and moderated fineArt forum, the oldest continuing bulletin board/newsletter published on the Internet.

He has established and developed curricula and educational programmes at a number of universities internationally such as University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Hogeschool voor Kunsten, Utrecht, the Netherlands; and acted as visiting professor at such institutions as University of Milan, Italy; University of Bremen, Germany; Royal Academy, U.K; Slovak Technical University, Slovakia; and others.

Lauzzana earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an MSc in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he completed all but the dissertation in the PhD programme.
He worked for years at architecture firms before working in various capacities in computer-related fields, including systems programmer, computer scientist, computer graphics exhibitions coordinator, computer graphics magazine editor and software developer.