preface.archive /
forword.grants /
marketing.colony /
equiptment acquisition /
symptom hall.space /
phoenix.cinecycle /
ancient futures.the net /
performance.women's work /
gender.performance /
do it yourself ethos-zines /
robot writing /
pamphlets.women's work /
oca.zines /
retail.books /
history.books /
pheonix.cinecycle
Cinecycle is one of several self-funded spaces that Martin Heath has operated and lived in with his bicycle repair business over the last twenty years. Repeatedly closing up shop under pressure from angry neighbours, he always resurfaces, phoenix-like, with another programming configuration. Martin Heath owns a vast collection of aging projectors and spare parts and offers the service of hauling his hefty "portable" 35mm film projector to screenings in other venues. For marginal and oppositional programmers, this is the only reliable access to 35mm projection.
Martin Heath's spaces and programming have been sustained by many cohorts and tireless volunteers over the ages, who bring some semblance of order to his packrat style of operation. Martin is a "thrift score" expert, a yard-sailing pirate, node in an underground network of nighthawks who cannibalize the growing cinematic scrapyards. His collection of 16mm prints includes Cuban and African third cinema, radical documentary, go-go music shorts, art films, roaring twenties hard-core porn and much more. Teachers and programmers committed to presenting activist film in an historical context have relied on Martin Heath's collection and projection. Artist-run centres and filmmakers have sublet the Cinecycle facility. Marginal programming entities such as the Purple Institute and Shake Well got started in and inhabit Cinecycle, especially at the points in their existence when they have no money.
Many "Cinemateque" exhibition venues, festivals and artist-run centres have been well-funded to mount screenings, make archives and build equipment access facilities without providing marginal producers with the consistent access available at Martin's for decades. Funders and some of the alternative arts aristocracy might write off Martin as an obsessive-compulsive anomaly and argue that it is structurally impossible to fund his spaces, let alone expect that his deviance can or should be replicated in the exhibition infrastructure. As individualistic as Martin Heath is, he is not an isolated blip in the matrix of cultural production here; he does not operate in a vacuum. Atomizing his practice erases a history, for Martin Heath is only one gifted member of a legion of cultural producers in this town who for years have moved from one volunteer formation to another - publishing, programming, working on live art venues, in retail outlets, participating in committees and cultural working groups. This disruptive, nomadic art workforce perennially operates with only the most tenuous links to administrative sinecures in stable, well-funded art power-bases.
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