Gas gallery archive

For the past many months I’ve been working on building a digital archive for Gas gallery, a mobile, autonomous, experimental and networked platform for contemporary art located in a truck, parked at various sites around Los Angeles. Gas was founded and directed by Ceci Moss, and Ceci was an ideal partner to work with. Over the past two years I’ve been working on building out systems of support for artist-run spaces to engage in archiving projects, so this was a perfect collaboration.

The shows at Gas were adventurously multidisciplinary and experiential, and every aspect – the truck gallery, web projects, performances, publications, editions – played an equally important role in presentation. The space’s inherently itinerant and fluid format allowed considerable independence and creative freedom in terms of concept, site, format, audience, and engagement.

The site presents the full history of Gas, including artwork, artists, zines, artist editions, event documentation and writing from the director. Caleb Stone was the site designer, and created a gorgeous design. Andrew LeClair provided technical assistance. And a special thank you to Amelia Marzec who helped Caleb and I debug a difficult cross-browser issue.

For those interested in the ‘stack,’ the site is built in Kirby, which allows us to run a browser CMS but render the site out statically. We made this choice in order to give more weight to site longevity and resiliency while also allowing us to build a backend database of site content. There are many hundreds of image files, each rendered to multiple sizes, and each with their own metadata files.

Now that the site is released, I’d love to hear what you think. Thanks to all of the artists whose work is included, to Ceci for working with us, and to Caleb, and Andrew (and Amelia).

The Gas gallery archive is part of a larger project on Archiving Artist-Run Spaces. For a previous archive I’ve worked on, also with Caleb, check out Experimental Archive Space for Space 1026.

Workshops on archiving

I’m working on two workshops relating to archiving artist-run spaces, to teach techniques, tools and ideas in this area, and as a run-up to publishing a website on this topic. This May I’ll be presenting a workshop on this topic at ISEA conference, the International Symposium on Electronic Art, in Paris.

In June I’ll also be presenting a workshop at the HASTAC 2023 conference at Pratt College in Brooklyn. HASTAC = Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. At Pratt I’ll also be presenting an exhibit of a number of archives I’ve been building.