News log
PhonoStatic cassettes included in BBC-sponsored podcast
2009-06-01 / Lloyd Dunn was interviewed recently by Felicity Ford for her 'Domestic Soundscape' podcast concerning the PhonoStatic series of cassettes, a project now a quarter-century in the past. Felicity's podcast is a wide-ranging collection of interviews and excerpts from numerous sound workers.
Listen here.
PhotoStatic Takes Part in Dortmund Group Show
2008-07-19 / A major retrospective from the pages of PhotoStatic takes place as part of the group exhibition “Deleted by Memeright Trusted System,” curated by Inke Arns and Francis Hunger in the framework of Arbeit 2.0 - intellectual property law, copyright and creative work in the digital age. The exhibition takes place at Hartware MedienKunstVerein at PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, Germany, July 19 - October 19, 2008. “Arbeit 2.0 - intellectual property law, copyright and creative work in the digital age" is a cooperation between the Berlin-based project iRights.info / mikro e.V. and Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund, which discusses the relation of creative work, copyright and technology.
See description.
Visualizing Poetics on “Photostatis”
2006-09-03 / Geof Huth blogs the “completion” of the Retrograde Archive, and points out that there is still something missing – the single issue of video art entitled VideoStatic has not yet been added. At some point in the future it will happen, but when? Difficult to say.
Here’s the link to Geof’s blog post.
Czech Gallery Posts Interview
2006-08-17 / The Prague gallery Školská 28 has posted an interview with Lloyd Dunn in connection with an exhibit of electronic prints that were on display there a year ago. The works in question first appeared in PhotoStatic no. 49. (The interview is in Czech.)
See Školská 28
Blog documents Xerox Art
2005-10-07 / PhotoStatic contributor Reed Altemus has a blog called Tonerworks. In it, he catalogs the current state of copy art. Those of you familiar with PhotoStatic will no doubt notice familiar names, still at it after all this time.
See Tonerworks.
“Beyond Cyberpunk” makes it to the Web
2005-10-07 / Sometime in the early 90s, a package arrived in our mailbox containing five floppy disks assembled in an attractive package called “Beyond Cyberpunk: A Do-it-yourself Guide to the Future”. It would be difficult (and perhaps unwise) to fully describe the frisson of excitement that this caused in us. Now you can experience that same frisson from the convenience of your web browser. Edited by Gareth Branwyn and Peter Sugarman.
See Beyond Cyberpunk.
“Jūtōpia” Opens in Prague
2005-06-30 / Gallery opening for the exhibition “Jútópia”, a collection of color lasographs by Lloyd Dunn, many of which first appeared in Psrf 49, almost seven years ago. The exhibition takes advantage of improvements in color laser printing and imaging technology, offering the public’s first look at these images in a large format. The exhibit takes place at Školská28 - Komunikační Prostor, in Prague.
See www.skolska28.cz.
2005-03-26 / Lloyd Dunn presented “Thank You For Interacting: the Photostatic Magazine Retrograde Archive: Using mail and machines to build worldwide communities in the 1980s” during the panel “Practicing Collage Artists” at the conference Collage as Cultural Practice, organized by Kembrew MacLeod and the Dada Archive’s Ruedi Kuenzli. The other presentations and presenters were: mIEKAL aND, Poet, Intermedia Artist, and Editor of Xexoxial Endarchy, and Camille Bacos, Romanian Filmmaker, “MotionText Ferment”; Bradley Adida; and Steev Hise. This is what Dunn talked about:
“I’m going to talk about my publication Photostatic Magazine, which ran from 1983 to 1998. Using photocopy and an esthetic that heavily relied upon collage, Photostatic became the center of one of the hundreds of small, dispersed artistic communities that flourished during the 1980s. Using independent, samizdat, and do-it-yourself credos, these projects took many forms — including most notably photocopied ’zines and audio and video cassette tapes — and made use of the post office as their primary vector of distribution. The assumption made by most participants was that works were given on an reciprocal, exchange-driven basis: you submit to my zine or tape and you’ll get a free copy of anything in which your work appears. In these activities, we can hear the echoes of potlach, utopianism, punk, and other non-mainstream (and probably anti-mainstream) thinking.”
… more: http://www.uiowa.edu/obermann/collage.html.
2004-10-23 / Lloyd Dunn gives an overview of PhotoStatic Magazine at the Radical Connectors conference in Weimar, Germany.
… more: http://rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2425.
2004-06-29 / In the aftermath of the Wizards of OS conference, which featured this archive in its exhibition “Public Library”, a review has appeared, and posted to this site. We thank Florian Cramer for forwarding it to us, and Matthias Weiß for allowing us to reproduce it (via a Creative Commons licence).
… read it here: http://psrf.detritus.net/texts/wizardsofos.html.
2004-06-03 / The editor of this project, Lloyd Dunn, will be representing this work at the Wizards of OS conference, which will be held in Berlin June 9 to 13. Florian Cramer is organizing a roundtable discussion concerning the copyright alternatives and public information. Cramer wrote this for the conference Wiki:
The history of copyright-critical art from the fringes of post-1960s experimental currents such as Mail Art to the subcultural Internet art activism of the 1990s is unlikely to be documented better anywhere but in the magazine PhotoStatic/Retrofuturism, from its first appearance in 1983 until its present, digital "retrograde edition".
In the beginning, PhotoStatic appeared as a non-commercial, small press zine for copy art, i.e. art produced and reproduced with photocopy machines. Gradually, the periodical developed from a loose collection of materials in the manner of an artistic edition of multiples to a forum for essays, criticism and columns of a worldwide, networked copyright-critical artistic practice. The Plunderphonics band Tape-beatles, co-founded by Lloyd Dunn in 1988, played an important role in this process when it began to publish a magazine "Retrofuturism" within the magazine of PhotoStatic. "Retrofuturism" initiated a new perception of writings and the détournement aesthetic of the Situationist International and made the "Plagiarism" and "Art Strike" campaigns, which had been launched in England as offshoots of the artistic subculture of Neoism, known to an international audience. Between 1988 and 1993, Lloyd Dunn's periodicals became the general chronicle and discourse forums of these campaigns. The Art Strike was accompanied by the periodical leaflet "YAWN", and the "Copyright VIolation Squad Bulletin" intervened into the legal controversies around the Plunderphonics music of Negativeland and Jon Oswald.
Since 2002, Lloyd Dunn is busy reconstructing all of the above publications, whose total volume comprises more than two thousand pages, in digital form, making them available them as freely downloadable PDF files. The "Public Library" provides these texts both on paper and as digital files which can be freely burned onto a CD.
… Wiki link: <http://wiki.wizards-of-os.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Dunn-PhotoStatic>;
… Conference link: <http://www.wizards-of-os.org/>;
… Dunn’s bio: <http://www.wizards-of-os.org/index.php?id=913&L=3>
2004-05-01 / Writing for the Portuguese website Itaú Cultural, Sergio Kulpas presents our work to the Portuguese-speaking audience:
<google translation>
Xerox as one of the fine arts: Reviewed: PhotoStatic Magazine, edited by Dunn Lloyd - 1983-1998
"PhotoStatic Magazine" marked an age in experimental and artistic publications. Established by Dunn Lloyd in 1983, the magazine persisted (still that in irregular way) until 1998.
During this period, it functioned as a forum that it congregated and redistributed produced artistic works with the use of photocopy machines. It was the Xerox-art call, that included not only graphical works, but concrete poetry, essays, fictions, summaries and news articles of some artistic and cultural scenes. The magazine recorded the facts of artistic communities underground, as zines, the postal art (very en vogue in 80s), produced with a typewriter (before the advent of word processors and even though of the personal computer).
Now, all the editions of "PhotoStatic Magazine" and its derived publication, "Retrofuturism", had been converted into format pdf and into a site. The result opens a treasure for the reader interested in radical artistic proposals made with resources low-tech. The 20th century had some artistic movements that if had detached for the use of magazines as expression form. It can be thought about the magazines made for the dadaist in Paris, and those edited by the Brazilian modernistas in the decade of 1920 (as "Klaxon" and "Wood-Brazil"). To create a free archive on-line with this collection is a great fact. But it is interesting to observe here as the time and the technology nails a part in the imprudent eye. The art that appears in these magazines is flaring, since that if it keeps in mind the used technique in its confection. Are collages and assemblages made with manual techniques, using photocopy machines, ink, glue and shears. In the screen of the computer, these jewels of Xerox-art can seem one in such a way simplified, or easily executable using the Photoshop or another software. The same it occurs with the typographical well-taken care of extremity of the publication. Today it is possible to radically modify the typographical aspects with the touch of a button.
The alert one is basic for the generations youngest, accustomed with the electronic editing of texts and images. The manual editing was norm in the world until little more than twenty years. The types of impression were slugs of metal, made from sculptured molds. The collages were made with real glue. As of today all the magazines printed are created from electronic archives, are in the vertigo of a trick of mirrors when considering the transposition of these precious old magazines for the electronic format. The digital crossroads created by the Internet produce a figure paradoxical, as a drawing of M.C. Escher. The PhotoStatic/Retrofuturism project passed for some transformations, that reflected the moment of represented artistic chains in the magazines. In 1987, the publication if became spokesman of the group of intermedia Tape-beatles, also created for Dunn Lloyd. In the height of its popularity, the magazine suspended the publication per three years (of 1990 the 1993), to fulfill to the "artistic strike" proposal for the Neoist group.
When resurging in middle of the decade of 90, the project had lost its force. The internet had initiated its explosion and the cultural moment for this type of magazine seemed to have been lost.
The site is placing the complete collection on-line slowly, and the last issue to be converted for pdf (inside of some years) must be the first edition, of August of 1983. The archivists observe that the magazine had world-wide distribution and readers in the Europe, Asia, Oceania and even in Brazil.
Sergio Kulpas
</google translation>
Here’s the source text:
o xerox como uma das belas artes
Revista: PhotoStatic Magazine, editada por Lloyd Dunn - 1983-1998, Grátis
A "PhotoStatic Magazine" marcou uma era em publicações experimentais e artísticas. Fundada por Lloyd Dunn em 1983, a revista persistiu (ainda que de modo irregular) até o final de 1998.
Durante esse período, ela funcionou como um fórum que reunia e redistribuía trabalhos artísticos produzidos com o uso de máquinas fotocopiadoras. Era a chamada xerox-art, que incluía não apenas trabalhos gráficos, mas poesia concreta, ensaios, ficções, resenhas e reportagens de várias cenas artísticas e culturais. A revista registrou os feitos de comunidades artísticas underground, como os zines, a arte postal (muito em voga nos anos 80), a produção caseira de fitas (antes do advento dos softwares de gravação e até mesmo do computador pessoal).
Agora, todas as edições da "PhotoStatic Magazine" e de sua publicação derivada, a "Retrofuturism", foram convertidas para o formato PDF e reunidas num site. O resultado abre um tesouro para o leitor interessado em propostas artísticas radicais feitas com recursos low-tech. O século 20 teve vários movimentos artísticos que se destacaram pelo uso de revistas como forma de expressão. Pode-se pensar nas revistas feitas pelos dadaístas em Paris, e aquelas editadas pelos modernistas brasileiros na década de 1920 (como "Klaxon" e "Pau-Brasil"). Criar um arquivo on-line gratuito com essa coleção é um grande feito. Mas é interessante observar aqui como o tempo e a tecnologia pregam uma peça no olho desavisado. A arte que aparece nessas revistas é deslumbrante, desde que se mantenha em mente a técnica usada em sua confecção. São colagens e montagens feitas com técnicas manuais, usando máquinas de fotocópia, tinta, cola e tesoura. Na tela do computador, essas jóias da xerox-art podem parecer um tanto simplórias, ou facilmente executáveis usando o Photoshop ou outro software. O mesmo ocorre com o extremo cuidado tipográfico da publicação. Hoje é possível alterar radicalmente os aspectos tipográficos com o toque de um botão.
O alerta é fundamental para as gerações mais jovens, acostumadas com a editoração eletrônica de textos e imagens. A editoração manual era norma no mundo até pouco mais de vinte anos. Os tipos de impressão eram pecinhas de metal, feitas a partir de moldes esculpidos. As colagens eram feitas com cola de verdade. Como hoje todas as revistas impressas são criadas a partir de arquivos eletrônicos, ficamos na vertigem de um truque de espelhos ao considerar a transposição dessas preciosas revistas antigas para o formato eletrônico. A encruzilhada digital criada pela Internet produz uma figura paradoxal, como um desenho de M.C. Escher. O projeto PhotoStatic/Retrofuturism passou por várias transformações, que refletiam o momento das correntes artísticas representadas nas revistas. Em 1987, a publicação se tornou porta-voz do grupo de intermídia Tape-beatles, também criado por Lloyd Dunn. No auge de sua popularidade, a revista suspendeu a publicação por três anos (de 1990 a 1993), para cumprir a "greve artística" proposta pelo grupo Neoist.
Ao ressurgir em meados da década de 90, o projeto tinha perdido sua força. A Internet havia iniciado sua explosão e o momento cultural para esse tipo de revista parecia ter passado.
O site está colocando a coleção completa on-line lentamente, e o último número a ser convertido para PDF (dentro de alguns anos) deve ser a primeira edição, de agosto de 1983. Os arquivistas observam que a revista tinha distribuição mundial e leitores na Europa, Ásia, Oceania e até no Brasil.
… The link: <http://www.itaucultural.org.br/index.cfm?cd_pagina=2012&cd_materia=596>.
2003-04-01 / A Slovenian website based in Ljubljana named Mladina, has posted a mention of this site. The text is in Slovenian. (We regret, we have no translation.)
PhotoStatic Magazine je leta 1983 zasnoval in urejal Lloyd Dunn, publikacija je izhajala do leta 1998. PhotoStatic Magazine je bil namenjen predvsem objavi del, ki so izkoriščala možnosti xerografije (fotokopije). Dela obsegajo grafična dela, konkretno poezijo, umetnost korespondence (correspondence art), eseje, zgodbe, ocene in poročila o dogodkih znotraj inciativ neoizma, zinov in umetnosti po pošti (mail art). Na spletni strani je dostopen obsežen arhiv PhotoStatic Magazin-ov.
… the link is <http://www.mladina.si/dnevnik/23127/>
