It’s been a busy week again for YT almost forgot to mention a panel appearance and short presentation about Backspace cybercafe at The V&A on Saturday 23rd November – Digital Art Communities: Hubs, Nodes & Networks – SOLD OUT! There is deck for this talk just in case of connection issues but really should have just read out the contents of this page !
It follows on from contributions to ‘Hubs, Nodes and Networks: a new history of British digital art’, a book published by Thames and Hudson but we haven’t yet seen a copy so tell us what you think of it if you have seen it!
Our host for the event is Pita Arreola, a London based curator and co-founder of Off Site Project, a curatorial platform that through exhibitions, events and residencies promotes international new media talent. Also on the panel is Zaiba Jabbar an award-winning director, independent curator and the founder of HERVISIONS. Catherine Mason is an independent art historian and author who has been researching the history of computer and digital art since 2002 – makes four!
When we first tried to arrange a working space in 1995, Matt Black of NinjaTune was quick to offer us a side room to work things out. We outgrew and moved into our own room below them within months, to establish the relatively short lived but well loved web boutique Obsolete!
The Backspace idea was first considered to accommodate social overflow from the new studio, where we worked and played 24/7 to build the earliest of experimental html based websites for The Fortean Times, On-U records, WARP records, Nature magazine and Levi’s Europe, out of which only Backspace survives intact !
The new ground floor space though took on a life of it’s own and was fitted out by sculptor Tim Cook before opening early in 1996 to begin offering public access to direct publishing onto the WWW. This view circa 1999 features the work of artist John Hayward – Hayvend and the Pop Sewage of Tod Hanson.
By early spring the https://backspace.org website we see today took shape. It was developed by Obsolete designer Dorian Moore in response to our vague suggestions it should ‘show a dynamic pick of published projects on the splash page’ so everyone got a fair crack at exposure for their products. His response was to use PLA tide tables to refresh a floatsom and jetsom of animated GIF links.
Our record keeping and image archiving left a lot to be desired, similarly few of Obsolete and it’s many projects survive but are still listed. The Backspace web system needed server migration so often over the years, some bits got lost in transit. It’s mostly OK now, since Kass Schmitt wheeled by to repair it, just some broken links for offsite connections that were dissolved decades ago remain!
We were influenced by so many innovators and experimenters not least Heath Bunting’s Cybercafe log, Luini’s IUMA and Jamie Levy’s production of ‘The Word‘, a very early and trailblazing webzine based in NY that was 6 months ahead of us all. Heath later organised a series of one day un-conferences at Backspace where each contributor had just a couple of mins to describe their work – introducing us to a wealth of ideas and energies – a who’s who of euro web culture! https://www.irational.org/cybercafe/backspace/
Before the end of 1999 there were 100+ published objects being churned by tides on http://backspace.org.
We were busy each day with fresh subscribers and public interest was rising. Doors opened at noon and closed at 8pm 6 days a week with Monday offline for reset and rest! Spacers took on the opening and closing, playing tag with the keys, particularly on the days when caring for our young family made it hard to get out of the house!
Those 4 years we remained active were intensely experienced but limited our opportunities to get out and about London. As much as people came to us with fresh energy each day it was something of a relief when it stopped at the end of 1999 with eviction. A massive squat party to celebrate the new millennium in the recently emptied building went on for a month until developers paid them off, which was just about right!
We returned to occupy the Starbucks once again with ‘spacers’ and friends in 2006 for a lovely afternoon, but as you know, it’s never the same river twice!
