SteveInterview

I'm currently making a archive of everything magazine which I edited in the 1990s. The magazine has now become "historic" and  some people who are researching art in the 1990s have been asking where to get copies. I'm making a digital archive on my Raspberry Pi and and there's lots of scanning to do and lots of reading old articles. I'd forgotten I'd written a lot of this stuff and I disagree with some of the content we covered at the time. 

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It's a very strange experience so that's what I'm working on why did you decide to start this project because a few people who are doing PhD got in touch with me and they said do you have any old issues of the magazine or is there a website where we could read certain articles and because they want to understand the context in which certain articles or certain artworks were made because one of the things we did on the magazine was we commissioned artists to make work for the magazine you know like pages and we also commissioned artists to write and we use lots of different I say it again modes of address you know where we're like we we get people people would write stories or people would use lots of different methods rather than your standard art criticism sort of language the magazine about it was actually a magazine that started with investigating artists run initiatives so when an artist set up a a space A gallery or a group of artists made an exhibition we would cover specifically those things and in the 1990s in London a lot of initiatives like that happened people were taking over warehouses and you know big spaces and it was along with at the time was a bit at the time there was a a movement in people going to clubs and people making their own clubs and making their own parties in in warehouses and in in the countryside and and I think there's there's a lot of those initiatives grew out of that same culture from you know so that's how it grew up from that from that kind of rave culture I think yeah so this is the thing of your past how does it connect to current practice yeah it's an interesting thing because for a few years now I've been I've been working on this project called the fabulous loop de loop which is more of an academic project it's a it's actually a wiki but but it's it's yes it's it's it's reading historic documents from from further back than the 90s about a particular particular moment in history and what that work is about it's called the fabulous loop de loop or fluke it's about how over a century people started to think in terms of information instead of of energy yes so for instance we're people used to in the 19th century people thought a lot about you know consuming energy and somewhere along the line we started to think about things changing because of of the way information passes from one thing to another and it sounds very vague that but that's basically what it's about it's about that how the the the European mindset changed from a mindset of understanding the world as a as something which is to do with burning energy to to to something where we now are where it's about exchanging information so that that that was that so it has a little relation in that it's it follows some of the themes i was interested in when i was writing for everything my so it it it follows some of those issues but and and it's also actually to do with an archive which I actually didn't didn't realise but I'm more comfortable with archives now that I've been looking at lots of old old information about something called cybernetics which is the which is a science of feedback systems and that's what I've been busy with for for quite a while for too long actually yes but do you think you will find something for your current project in the archiving of the magazine yes already you saw I've started to rethink it because I started to read my old work and and that's it's depressing in one respect because you start to you start to see how little you've developed I start to see how little I my thinking has developed and I thought oh and in one way you could say Oh well I was really I was really on top of it wasn't I but but actually I I there's there's there's quite a lot that hasn't really moved on in Margaret thinking and I that's a that's a bit of a revelation not necessarily a positive one about looking at those looking at those old old issues I'm sure that there is a lot of things that are different now so maybe you can tell us more about projects that to have so much in common with this one yeah yeah well I have my own my own projects that don't have so much in common with this one yeah I yeah I'm writing this this big story called megafauna and I think it it has more to do with floop which is the fabulous loop to loop which is that thing I told you about then it has to do with everything magazine and it's a novel it's a it's a science fiction novel and it's about somebody who wrote writes this terrible terrible piece of writing and it's a very long big thing it's yes and he he this guy is named Warren McLean and he writes this terrible piece of fiction called megafauna and anybody really who reads it is like violently sick it's terrible you know it's really really bad and but he dies and and he leaves in his will the the stipulation that it be published and so the the the the the book is about how this terrible piece of literature becomes a cultural kind of agent and it has terrible I'm not going to give it away because it's it's it's very unlikely but somebody may read it one day and yeah so it has terrible implications there so that's a little bit different to the to the other things I've been working with OK significant the big significant choice was to actually you know take a deep deep breath and get and get these old issues together and scan them but because there was a duty to do it and it wasn't the duty wasn't necessarily to myself it was to the fact that lots of people worked on this magazine over many years and it was it was worked for 10 years this magazine from 92 to 2002 and a lot of people had worked on it and people are asking about it so people are curious so I thought it would be a good idea to to make it available to people so that was a big change of mind because you know in the past you you sometimes you just want to bury you want to bury the things you've done but so so I just thought appropriate to so that was a big change of mine I had to think about that you know whether I wanted to do that yeah people are still interested in it some really good yeah ask some questions that are yeah i think so i think i think that's why you have suppose people are looking at it but also they're looking at the differences because one of the reasons it's the magazine is that there weren't it's it's hard to believe that now but people didn't use insta and they didn't use any you know they they would rely on on on on magazines and and leaflets and fanzines and things to to inform them about what was going on that's a big change and it's quite that's quite shocking to look at because in 96 we made a website but that website is now so no one understands it because it you just go into it and you go into this 1996 website and it it's people think what's going on so that's another good reason to archive the magazine because then you can see the context you can see the the pages and you can see somebody's made notations in a in a in a in a what do they call it in the margin and things like that so so that's that's that's another reason to do it it's funnily enough the website which seems quite stable because it's done on kind of basic HTML is more outdated than the actual magazine because the magazine you can you get it you know OK this is printed there are things with dates on them and you know you know it it had a very specific time it's a very specific objects yeah so that's that's that's that now. so my task now shall we i'm going to go to