What is this?

➘Dig Archive is a personal collection of items I’ve been hoarding on my computer for years. I’ve been a longtime fan of UbuWeb. And I’ve been browsing, reading and recommending the Internet Archive for decades. In the days of Napster I would visit the music archives of folks sharing their collections. My love for digital archives doesn’t end there. I’ve researched and built digital archives for a number of artist-run spaces, liberating their images from closed platforms and building new handmade, personal spaces to share and sift through their creative works.

The items presented here are works collected over the years that I revisit and want to make available to others. Some of these can be found elsewhere online but many others can only be found here, or are in danger of disappearing due to link rot, obfuscation, old digital containers and codecs, or other forms of digital brittleness.

What items can be found in the ➘Dig Archive?

I’m an artist and musician, and use various forms of technology including creative coding, Digital Audio Workstations, modular synths (or modular visual programming languages). I’m particularly a fan of surfacing old software, tools and writing that may have been missed in the rush to the latest technology.

There are the informal rules of composer/musician John Zorn’s improvised “game pieces” that are handed down from musician to musician. There are coloring books and manuals, as well as half-manuals/half-coloring-books from virtuousic psychedelic synth designer Peter Blasser.

There are whole books, like the New Art/Science Affinities, a book on the intersection of art and technology, with big photographs and strong artist profiles, which I assign to students in my classes to read but had disappeared from their original website years ago. There are exhibition catalogs, such as for the exhibit FOOD about the same-named artist-run restaurant that included Gordon Matta-Clark within its community.

There are teaching activities on the Gee’s bend quilts, from the Philadelpha Museum of Art; conversations on self-hosted feminist servers; user guides for old game-making software Klik and Play; a slide show by artist and graffiti writer Barry McGee; and photographs of the funeral of Kazimir Malevich, which included a truck affixed with the black square to its bumper.

This and many more items can be found in my small archive, which will slowly grow. I hope you find items that you enjoy and potentially even build your own.

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For any questions or complaints relating to this website, to correct mistakes, or to request materials be removed, you can contact the webmaster.

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This site was built and designed by Lee Tusman, using a modified form of his website builder Panblog and set in Bagnard Sans, inspired by the graffiti of an anonymous prisoner of the napoleonic wars. Site code (c) 2025 Lee Tusman. Site design CC BY. No Gods, No Masters.