An informal personally-collected list of some digital archives of artist-run spaces, alternative spaces, DIY print media and collections, and digitally-born online-only digital creative art-making communities.
Jump to artist-run spaces archives.
Jump to born digital community archives.
AS-AP on Internet Archive's Wayback machine
Description: Note: this site was archived by the Internet Archive wayback machine but to the best of my knowledge was not preserved by the organizers. Not all pages were saved. "Art Spaces Archives Project [AS-AP] is a non-profit initiative founded in 2003 by a consortium of alternative arts organizations, including Bomb Magazine, the 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 art spaces in the United States from the 1950's to the present."
With funding provided by NYSCA, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, AS-AP was initiated with a mandate to begin the documentation process by constructing a national index of the producers and presenters of alternative and avant-garde art.
Description: "ELEVATOR MONDAYS, a social exhibition space built inside a decommissioned 4ft x 6ft freight elevator....the project revolved around weekly Monday night community BBQs at our studio building. These pot-luck events were social opportunities for members of the LA art community to come together and hang out once a week with friends and food. Following in this tradition, ELEVATOR MONDAYS functions as a social space for art and dialogue. The intimate scale and discrete location of the space allows for a more personal, conversational experience for both the viewers and the artists."
Created by Don Edler
Description: "Located in a truck gallery parked around Los Angeles and online, Gas was a mobile, autonomous, experimental and networked platform for contemporary art. Each season, Gas would present one thematic exhibition that includes works in the gallery and online. All shows included a fundraiser edition and a zine publication."
Site by Lee Tusman and Caleb Stone.
Description: "Experimental Archive Space is an experimental archival documentation project for a DIY arts organization. Space 1026 is a 23-year old DIY artist collective and studio, event, and printmaking space in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This web-based experimental archive collects: documentation images from the past two decades of events at Space 1026; an oral history of the collective; and generative zine-making software to produce digital and printable zines with photographs and interviews."
Compiled by Lee Tusman.
Description: "HBML was a storefront arts space in Worcester MA in the guise of a donation-based thrift store. HBML hosted exhibits by varying artists and sold used goods...This is a series of web pages to serve as incomplete documentation. Pictures are not ordered chronologically, in themes, or in order of importance, but by file name. Things will be out of order, but related pics have a strong likelihood of being grouped. I think that's as good a way to approach the material as any. No one (except me I guess) experienced the store in a chronological way, it was always just, you'd come in, and there were layers of things, echos of the past, and areas of potential for future action. These pics are not good documentation by art project standards, or by any standards really! They were just taken by people at the store, or by me for some other purpose, or by me for no purpose."
Compiled by Jacob Berendes.
Description: "Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) is a public archive and library dedicated to contemporary art-making. LACA collaborates with artists to build archival collections, which include studio leases, contracts, paystubs, performance apparel, set pieces, police reports, text messages, class syllabi, and materials from formally running art spaces. These collections enable us to learn from each other’s experiences and create new works that privilege the desires and needs of our communities."
Directed by Hailey Loman. Lead archivist Saida Largaespada.
Description: A weekly fusion of cabaret theater and improvisational exploration, the Open Stage was a mad place where musicians, thespians and circus freaks came to play.
Images and videos are hosted on the Internet Archive.
Assembled by Russ Sharek.
CC BY
Description: "In 2017, I founded The Portal as a way to explore what it means to archive performance, asking how an archive might operate as a kind of "living" space that develops protocols for process and regeneration, attuning to the ways of knowing that emerge from embodied practices."
Founded by Cori Olinhouse. Design by Laurel Schwulst.
Description: "Prelinger Archives was founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City. Over the next twenty years, it grew into a collection of over 60,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Prelinger Archives remains in existence, holding approximately 11,000 digitized and videotape titles (all originally derived from film) and a large collection of home movies, amateur and industrial films acquired since 2002. Its primary collection emphasis has turned toward home movies and amateur films, with approximately 18,000 items held as of Spring 2021. Its goal remains to collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere."
Compiled by Rick Prelinger
Description: "Goal: To preserve original; Underground, Rave, Club, Disco, and any other underground memorabilia. Why: As the years go by, old rave flyers and rave posters are lost, damaged, thrown away, and recycled. This project is to ensure rave flyers and rave posters are curated and stored in a healthy environment."
Compiled by Matthew Johnson.
Description: "The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) was first launched in November 2003 in an effort to preserve queer zines and make them available to other queers, researchers, historians, punks, and anyone else who has an interest DIY publishing and underground queer communities."
Spaces: Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments
Description: "SPACES—Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments—is dedicated to the study, documentation, and preservation of art environments and self-taught artistic activity. It is currently a preservation project of Kohler Foundation."
Electronic Literature Collection
Description: Compiled by a team of volunteers as a publication of the Electronic Literature Organization. Each volume of the Electronic Literature Collection is published on the Web and as a physical version. The physical publication of the ELC3 is forthcoming. Each edition has editors and collective editorial statement. Individual archived works are accompanied by links to the work, an archived version, live demo with custom text, source code, pdf, link to its home online, video documentation, statement, bio, editorial statment, downloads and metadata.
Compiled by the Electronic Literature Organization.
Description: What this site offers is a glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 characters that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them. The focus is on mid-1980's textfiles and the world as it was then, but even these files are sometime retooled 1960s and 1970s works, and offshoots of this culture exist to this day.
Compiled by Jason Scott
Description: 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...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.
Compiled by: Dr. Dos
The Glorious Trainwrecks Software Collection Description: "Glorious Trainwrecks is about bringing back the spirit of postcardware, circa 1993. It's about throwing a bunch of random crap into your game and keeping whatever sticks...Together, you and I will bring the true spirit of indie gaming back. Yes, you! For this site is about nothing, if it is not about getting off your ass and creating." When the Internet Archive announced they supported running Windows 3.1 software in the browser, the admin of Glorious Trainwrecks announced a project to archive a selection of games made with Klik'n'play, a beloved old DOS game-making program. Additional info.
Compiled by SpindleyQ
Description: "Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. By the letter of the law, the site is questionable; we openly violate copyright norms and almost never ask for permission. Most everything on the site is pilfered, ripped, and swiped from other places, then reposted. We’ve never been sued—never even come close. UbuWeb functions on no money—we don’t take it, we don’t pay it, we don’t touch it; you’ll never find an advertisement, a logo, or a donation box. We’ve never applied for a grant or accepted a sponsorship; we remain happily unaffiliated, keeping us free and clean, allowing us to do what we want to do, the way we want to do it."
Compiled by Kenneth Goldsmith.
