Preserving Artist-Run and DIY Spaces Online Activities Workshop

Strategic Preservation of Online Communities: A Workshop. ISEA 2023. Lee Tusman.

Title on top of a black and white 1970s image of Community Memory. Community Memory was a networked electronic bulletin board system installed in record shops and other community centers in Berkeley, CA in the 1970s. In the image are two people sitting at a computer terminal in front of a physical bulletin board. The terminal has a plastic cover and cardboard side panel that says Community Memory in hand drawn marker.

Workshop goals

“Methods” workshop
Case studies
Practical, hands-on
Bring our whole selves, backgrounds, experiences, knowledge and skills.

I’ll show many examples of archives, including several that I’ve built, and show how I turned zines, press releases, scraped or collected images, and oral history interviews into web-based archives, as well as how I’m planning for longterm archiving.

Important Questions

Questions guide the way.

who is /was the community?
What did/do they do?
why is it important?

What to preserve?

This is linked to your purpose. * Interviews * Images * Videos * Emails * Reviews * blogs/”posts” * events/flyers * Forums * Social media * Screenshots * What else?

Examples of DIY archives

see Archives

ELC

Electronic Literature Collection screenshot, Collection 1. A grid of screenshots of electronic literature, labeled Electronic Literature Collection Volume One.

Textfiles

I like the questions listed on the front page of textfiles.com Where are the files? Who are you? Why does this matter? What was it like? How can I help? The “What was it like?” question seems very important to me, and hardest to answer. Image is a screenshot of textfiles.com with the title and a description and the above questions.

Description: A screenshot of Textfile Writing Groups. There is a text description of how groups of close internet friends in the 80s formed informal groups and published files on online bulletin boards under their group names. Examples in the screenshot are 9X, AnarchyInc, BAR. The text appears like an old terminal - green text on black.

Museum of ZZT

ZZT is a text-mode game from 1991 created by Tim Sweeney of Epic Games. ZZT has its own editor and scripting language which offers what may still be an unmatched level of accessibility to beginning game developers. A significant number of ZZT worlds were created by authors in their early teenage years, with some being made by children under 10. ZZT’s simple ZZT-OOP scripting language gave many a friendly introduction to programming. Description: Screenshot of Museum of ZZT. A text description, excerpted above, and a grid of “New Releases” showing screenshots of various ZZT game-worlds.

The goal of the Museum of ZZT site is to collect these worlds, offer discussions into them and the community built around them, and keep them safely preserved. It is the hope of the Museum that the generally unknown works of ZZT community can be easily discovered and that their importance can be recognized.

Glorious Trainwrecks Software Collection

The Glorious Trainwrecks Software Collection. Screenshot of the collection on the Internet Archive showing there are 246 items, an intro written by Glorious Trainwrecks tying the work to early 90s “Postcardware” games and then 4 example games, including A Blackthorne and his Blob, A Boy and His Rhinoceros, A Very Velociraptor Christmas and Alladin Hates Penguins. Each includes a screenshot of the game.

A screenshot from the original Glorious Trainwrecks website showing a selection of games with titles, dates, creator and screenshot or logo. Submitted games are Binky XXVI: Die Wunderkammer vom BINKY, nerdsnipe: the game, Super Vadimka V: Versus Roman Norrow; Damon 1, Open World Jam, Black Screen, and Clown Party: Part 2.

The Serving Library

The Serving Library is a journal, a web archive, and a physical archive of framed objects.

HBML

HBML DIY space single page

Rave Preservation Project

The largest collection of rave flyers in the world. RPP is a rave and underground memorabilia archival project. Rave Flyers, Rave Flyers, Rave Flyers! Rave Preservation Project: Preservation of original; Underground, Rave, Club, and Disco memorabilia. Peace Love Unity Respect! http://www.ravepreservationproject.com/ Screenshot shows the top of the landing page, an example Rave flyer QUASAR and an image card of a gofundme campaign on the right labeled Buy RPP New Computers showing they raised $6000.

QZAP

Queer Zine Archive Project - https://archive.qzap.org/ Description: Image shows a simple website labeled QZAP Zine Archive now with xZINECOREx. Welcome to the QZAP Zine Archive. There is a description and randomly selected zines. There is Fuzz Box and Queer Fanzine Roze Lente 97 Special, both in a roughly photocopied punk aesthetic.

Little Berlin

Little Berlin website. A screenshot of a simple mid 2000s website. There is a youtube video of the Little Berlin Annex. Below is a text description explaining Little Berlin is over (RIP) and what happened (the building sold) and a link to find out about members, events, about, zine library, press. For this archive I scraped the original squarespace and added additional content and replicated the web 1.0 site design, in collaboration with Peter Erickson.

Experimental Archive Space

Description: A screenshot of the Experimental Archive Space, an archive of Space 1026. On the left is a description of this DIY space from Philadelphia, PA. On the right are some images and text. The text are links to a zine maker online, photos and about. Giant questions in the forefront are How is it run? How do you deal with conflict? What would you like other DIY spaces to know? How has Space 1026 maintained itself…? There is an image of a person wearing a wig and bright sequined vest holding a mic. And a photo of a pink spider-looking sculpture. I directed this archive project for Space 1026 with designer/programmer Caleb Stone.

A screenshot of Space 1026 photos section showing a shoebox approach to collecting images. There are layers of overlapping images from Space 1026 over the years such as people playing music in the street - accordion and banjo. There are soft sculptures, a drawing of a dog in a cap, half-covered, labeled “Of Egypt”, a pixelated flower illustration, and a postcard of a flyer for a show for a A Film by Robert Millis of Sublime Frequencies in 2010.

A screenshot of the Zine Maker software on Experimental Archive Space, showing an interface to select color quantity and length. In the center is a generated zine with the question What would you advise people who want to start their own space and collective, and two responses from Andrew And Ben from oral history interviews.

Prelinger Archives

The Prelinger Collections hosts their digital archive on the Internet Archive. Screenshot shows the Internet Archive page for the Prelinger Archives. There are cards for 10 out of 8,599 movies. Each of the 8 have a screenshot representing the video and a title.

UbuWeb

UbuWeb is over two decades old. Started as a way to share avant garde art and film, it morphed into something stranger, and is largely built off files collected from torrents and the like. The screenshot shows the landing page of UbuWeb, a very minimal late 1990s era style design. In the top left is a black and white image of a man’s head, I believe John Cage.

AS-AP

This website expired several years ago.A screenshot of the wayback machine archived page of “Art Spaces Archives Project AS-AP is a non-profit initiative founded by a consortium of alternative art organizations, including Bomb Magazine, College Art Association, Franklin Furnace Archive, New York State Council on the Arts NYSCA, New York State Artist Workspace Consortium, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, with a mandate to help preserve, present, and protect the archival heritage of living and defunct for- and not-for-profit spaces of the”alternative” or “avant-garde” movement of the 1950s to the present throughout the United States”

Gas

Gas gallery - a screenshot of the web-based archive I built for Gas gallery, in collaboration with Gas director Ceci Moss, and with assistance by designer and programmer Caleb Stone

Kitchen Sisters podcast

Kitchen Sisters podcast - We can consider a podcast a kind of archival project, especially one where you interview participants in a community on their projects and/or history.

Elevator Mondays

Elevator Mondays book

LACA

The Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) challenges established concepts of the archive and art institution, sustaining a unique experimental environment for critical inquiry, artistic research, and public dialogue. LACA is an art archive, library, and exhibition space located in Chinatown, Los Angeles. A photo of LACA’s physical space in LA showing shelves with books, organized on one bookcase and open on book holders on the other and containing elaborate style and color and size artist books.

What to preserve?

This is linked to your purpose. Linked to your purpose. Don’t preserve everything, it’s impossible. Be strategic.

Interviews
Images
Videos
Emails
Reviews
blogs/”posts”
events/flyers
Forums
Social media
Screenshots
What else?

Publications

Consider longevity and physical media.

websites
zines
books, booklets

Nice to have

Data entry / media collectors, programmers, money, energy

Permissions

Permission forms and notices, fair use. I have extension notes and a guidebook for DIY archives built in collaboration with NYU Law that I will distribute to all participants.

Design Principles and Useability

Accessibility

How can you make things clear with useful descriptions? Think through your system and implement it consistently. There are best practices and tools! You don’t have to figure it out yourself. Plaintext and images with useful descriptions will get you far.

Form: Plain Text

(+folders and images), Shoebox vs Curated personal zine, Intro text

Hierarchy of Resiliency

An ASCII hierarchy of resiliency - on the top: Our custom designed GUI software, like a website. Below: text user interface (TUI) or Command Line Interface (CLI) programs, below that: the OS, with builtin programs to navigate and view media, files. On the bottom level: text files, images, in folders.

Community Memory

Community memory from https://www.histoiredesinventions.com/grandes-dates-internet/ For more info on this project, check out https://www.artistsandhackers.org/Community-Memory I am referencing this 1970s-80s project as a reference because of its status as one of the first DIY networked ‘bulletin board’ style communities.

TUI/CUI

TUI and CLI: Flux Archive 0.1 1) View the archive dir…, 2) See a random archive page 3) See a random image 4) (Selected) Read the book of memories 5) Enter your own memory 6) Quit. Presented on top in TUI form and below as CLI.

Xavier Roi retrospective

Featured mac computers with the filesystem, video files, text files, PDFs. That’s it. The OS was the interface.

Tools

Scraping tools:

Octoparse, ScrapeStorm and other commercial tools with freemium models

Wayback Machine, Conifer, Webrecorder

Plaintext! Markdown!

Ideas? Comments? Collaborations? Contact Me! Lee Tusman https://leetusman.com https://artistsandhackers.org Mastodon: @artistsandhackers@post.lurk.org