Zach Phillips, "OSR - Catalog #1 - Spring 2015"

Here is an artifact from my salad days hanging out at hippie noise underground shows in Boston. In truth, I don’t even know what OSR stands for, and I only know a handful of the artists on the labels roster through association with such venues as The Whitehaus, Deep Thoughts, and Gay Gardens in Jamaica Plain and Allston. I thought when I picked this item out it would be only a nostalgia-activator for the years where I would go out every weekend to get fucked up with my friends and go see Guerilla Toss play house shows. I was instead quite surprised to find within it a cogent argument for today, and something I spend a lot of time thinking about now: going utterly offline.

This catalog isn’t a supplement to the label, but an attempt to divorce it entirely from digital technologies. At the time I probably thought this was histrionic, I probably thought it impossible to separate being in a band with having a Bandcamp, to separate making photos from having an Instagram. In addition to a list of available titles and instructions for ordering via US mail, the catalog contains features from artists on OSR. Writing by Al Marantz, Andrea Schiavelli, Chris Weisman, and an interview with Joey Pizza Slice. The centerpiece is a letter from the editor and it’s a pure luddite banger- it’ll be reproduced below. It totally crystallizes for me my own discomfort with social media, but particularly the labor you feel you have to perform on social media to be an artist. The endless driving impulse that to succeed, to get anywhere, you have to always be performing yourself and performing your art for the timeline- and for what? The opportunity to hock Lightroom presets on your story? Sell out a zine once a year? Doesn't it make you sick?

I don’t know if my attitude is quite as severe as Zach Philip’s is here, I have some amount of hope for independent and transparent platforms, especially the ATProto services that are proliferating, to recapture the protean spirit of the early web. I don’t know if “woke _____ “ platforms can really escape the problem, or if going offline can really repair your subjectivity. I do know this little manifesto gave me goosebumps, and anyone who makes art to any degree should give it a read, and consider how much of your creative energies you want to sacrifice to the attention machine.

Read ---> https://www.are.na/block/44208093