Cirrus@Austlit

'As an Australian artist book researcher, I have spent a lot of time trying to find many of the historical sources for our community conversations, image repositories, and gallery & award event webpages, and was confronted by a wave of 404 pages. I learned the pungent term link rot, where links change content or move to a new online location, and the more poetic content drift, which describes the slow constant modification of websites. I also discovered how many holes there are in the Wayback Machine if your short exhibition only existed between crawling dates. The rise of artist books in Australia coincided with a period when books about the local field weren’t published because it was assumed that all the relevant information would be forever on the internet. This is the case for most scholarly disciplines, so there’s a sinking sense of working hard downwards into a black hole. I wrote a paper about this, published in The Blue Notebook (2021), but it struck me recently that all the screengrabs I took for it would make a great zine. I recently inherited a box of coloured dry-rub Letratone from a friend who was a graphic designer in the pre-computer era. They seemed to enjoy playing with the leftover shards of colour and I love them too, so I’m scanning them for new purposes. I think they perfectly illustrate the sense of digital ruin that we’re constantly encountering.' 

(Introduction)