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 /
preface.archive
"The old warehouse burned furiously.
And with it my matches."
- Patti Smith & Tom Verlaine,
The Night, Aloes Books 1976,
London.
In a dark space made close by the crush of people, reading after performance after art band took stage; in between were film strips - scratched castoffs from the trim bin of pop cinema, spun by Martin Heath, the archivist film DJ par excellence, on his rattling 16mm projector. It was a hot May night in 1979. 466 Bathurst was one of many places. In the late seventies in Toronto, artists set up a potent array of self-funded venues and publications. They formed brief allegiances and working crews. Using borrowed office machines and low or no-rent spaces, they created telecommunications networks, storefront window exhibits, film and performance venues, programs in bars, photocopied publications and distribution networks for books, films and videos. Now, these working methods proliferate again in an environment of cutbacks and constraints.
This network of short texts - reminiscences, quotes, opinions - taps into this rich vein of Toronto history and activity, as a start for a longer project and for placement on the web, I hope it will be accessed as an archive and rendezvous point, not an artifact that 'makes us history' through selective closure. But the reality of using the web is less like surfing than wading - up to your eyeballs - in a sea of junk mail. The good stuff is buried deep in cybersilt. At best, the hypercommercialized Internet is an adjunct to our local, embodied contexts - word-of-mouth grapevines, rented buildings and small-run printed matter. Perhaps we can use the web, critically, as a cross-referencing tool, one among many circulation systems linking people, ideas, images, forgotten and out-of-print texts, anecdotes and forwarding addresses.
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