Photostatic Magazine 1983-1998
The Content May Be Old,
But the Site is New
2002-01-20 / Background. Photostatic Magazine was a regular fixture and active proponent of the zine, audio art and DIY (do it yourself) counterculture that emerged during the 1980s. As a journal of so-called ‘machine art,’ Photostatic managed to bring together artists working across the spectrum of contemporary disciplines, including photocopy art, collage, correspondence or mail art, concrete poetry, experimental works, graphic design, photography, sound and video art, humor, essays, reviews, journalism, and more.
In addition to this wide range of subject matter, Photostatic’s contributors came from around the world; Japan, Australia, North and South America, and most nations of Europe, including many artists from the then-Warsaw Pact countries. Photostatic worked within a self-proclaimed ‘Eternal Network,’ which made use of photocopy, typewriters, rubber stamps, glue sticks, handwriting and the international postal system; in perhaps much the same spirit as people blog, surf, chat, email and code web pages today.
Announcement. Photostatic’s editor, Lloyd Dunn, is pleased to announce a new website devoted to historifying and archiving the project called Photostatic. This new site is intended to serve as a repository for a complete collection of Photostatic Magazine in electronic form (including its variant titles Retrofuturism and Psrf).
We further announce the immediate availability of the first issue in the PDF series, Psrf 49 (October 1998), which was the final issue in the printed series. New postings will follow at approximately one-month intervals.
We post these versions, one at a time, in like manner to how they first appeared, in deference to the print publication’s bimonthly schedule. We post them in reverse chronological order to form a mirror image in time of the original series. People entirely new to this content will therefore have the opportunity to see the work sequentially with its origins gradually unveiled, as opposed to how its creators saw it, inevitably in terms of an unfolding and surprising future.
-- TWikiGuest - 17 May 2002