|
|
|
|
|
Lloyd Dunn, PhotoStatic/Retrofuturism retrograde archive (1983-1998)  [http://psrf.detritus.net/]
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.
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
