Hi all, someone asked me offline about the status of This Week in Avant Garde CInema, so I thought I’d post my response here.
Since 1996 (25 years ago!) I’ve been producing or overseeing volunteers producing This Week in Avant Garde Cinema, a weekly listing of experimental film/video events around the world. I and a handful of volunteers initially entered the events manually every week, and in the early 2000s I converted it to a DIY system where venues and makers could enter their own listings. This worked well for a while, but as the ubiquity of social media grew, people started listing shows on other channels such as Facebook, and not TWIAGC. I developed some scripting to integrate those listings into TWIAGC, but it became a game of whack-a-mole keeping up with variations.
When the pandemic hit last year and physical exhibitions stopped happening. I put the project on pause. (You can still see the last post here.) I considered continuing it with online shows, but as the number of those grew that too started to seem daunting. And frankly, though I still enjoyed seeing the weekly compendium of some of the amazing shows happening across the U.S. and elsewhere, after nearly 25 years I was a bit tired of maintaining and overseeing it.
So at this point, even after physical shows start to come back, I will no longer be producing This Week in Avant Garde Cinema.
That said, the data entered for the previous listings still exists. While not all events were always included, the listings do provide a rich historical snapshot of thousands of events taking place over the last 20+ years.
And if someone with a lot of energy wants to take this on again, I’d be happy to help them get started.
Thanks for all the well-wishes and appreciation for this resource over the years. Stay safe and creative.
Scott
Scott Stark
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