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ancient futures.the net



There are rich historical links between junkyard-dog equipment stashes and Paleolithic cyborg theory and experiments with new communications technology. This technological work explores distribution potential and ramifications, rather than superior 'grain free' image-making production capabilities. Early art telecommunications experiments in Toronto were a product of the self-funded "marginal milieu" that published zines and set up performances at 466 Bathurst, Martin Heath's space in 1978-81.

"I have a hazy vision of the day when we all will have access to a computer network containing the entire body of known facts. In the meantime, we must start to construct our own network from our own shared needs... The Computerized Arts Network... is now being implemented in two geographically displaced computing nodes, New York and Toronto... Although CAN facilities are now going on line, this network is in a primitive developmental stage...
(Many) aspects of CAN must be discussed if we intend to create a workable global communications network. And if we don't do it, others, with their rather than our interests at heart, will."
- Willoughby Sharp, "WORLDPOOL : A Call for Global Community Communications",
Only Paper Today, December 1978. p 9



In 1978, less than a block from Symptom Hall in a former Ukrainian jewelry shop in a seedy, Queen street west-of-Bathurst location, Fred Gaysek, Kim Todd and I opened Rumour, a storefront to produce and distribute zine-type publications; two of us lived upstairs. The cheap xerox pamphlets and artist's books didn't pay for themselves and weren't meant to. There were no grants. We survived and paid the rent by collaboratively writing novelizations of horror movies and giving workshops on topics like, "How to Not Make Money From Your Art". Victor Coleman, A Space and Coach House Press Founder, published Only Paper Today there, after the tabloid was outsted from A Space in 1979. Rumour published xerox books and pamphlets, including the first printing of Kathy Goes to Haiti by Kathy Acker, and zine-type books and pamphlets by Philip Monk, Willoughby Sharp, Judy Rifka, Brian Kipping and others, and held rotating exhibitions in the window including John Greyson's first show which prompted a bizarre police interrogation. The local Ukrainians were concerned that his project, which involved the daily unfurling of red clothing items from a garbage bag, signaled the arrival of a Communist sect in the neighbourhood.

Rumour Publications hosted WORLDPOOL; Toronto's first continuous computerized arts network node (primitive Internet site). The group met weekly and was open to all. Artist and OCA electronic animateur Norman White was a founder and many artists, theoreticians and young proto-hackers attended, hearing about WORLDPOOL through the arts and computer mailboxing grapevines. Interactive telenetworking by computer mailbox, slow-scan video and 'facsimile transceivers' (the first demo portable fax machines) was often accompanied by a meal in these "dine on line" evenings. WORLDPOOL remained on-line from 1978 until 1981. Artists' distributed digital database networks of the 1970's are ignored in official histories of the Internet, that jump from early defense applications to the proliferation of modem-linked home computers in the mid-eighties. Art on the net did not begin with the defense department, techno-nerds, the McLuhan Institute, the OCA "Photo/Electric Arts" Department, the Art Research Centre (ARC), and certainly not the "established" subsidized video art centres and their entourages, though all these groupings became involved with WORLDPOOL.

By the beginning of the 80's, Rumour, WORLDPOOL and a number of other spaces and programming entities were sermonizing in print and workshops on grant-free do-it-yourself art survival tricks. Like Rave now, these artists twisted business imagery into insignia - clip art of telephones, urgent memo pads, logos, graphs and charts. A performance series was billed with the sub-title, "An Anti-Granto Production". That many younger and punk artists were disenfranchised from the grant system was only part of it. The attitude was that grant procedures and regulations were creatively and politically compromising. Self-funded venues were less subject to "prior approval" mechanisms, allowing for more spontaneous creation and dissemination of art, and a certain dissolving of the barrier between artists and audiences, producers and consumers. The Cabana Room was established in 1979 by Susan Britton and Robin Wall. Britton's 1979 letter of resignation from A Space registers this anxiety about artists' links to government :

"Call me paranoid but, it is my opinion that in Canada artists are encouraged to pay their bureaucratic dues. In fact, it's likely that early in his or her career a Canadian artist may suddenly realize that he or she is hanging out with none other than agents of the federal government!... My suggestion is to loosen the obnoxiously close relationship between artists and funding bodies... I think artists should reinvent the artworld rather than just fitting in where they can."
- Susan Britton, Letter of Resignation as A Space's 'Visual Arts Curator',
July 24 1979.




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