Unthinkable Things #8: Culture disinterred

As with music, the sheer volume of underground of underground art video and film now available online would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

photo by Brian Gurrola - some rights reserved (Creative Commons 2.0)

I've written and talked about at some length the fact that when I was growing up as an avid music fan, I ended up reading about for more music that I actually ever heard. It's a theme I'll be exploring more in the Unthinkable blog, because the implications are vast.

But here's something else. I first started to become interested in underground film and video in my 20s, but again, with little available on video, and few opportunities to see screenings (London is notoriously poor even for repertory cinema, let alone art film) I ended up reading about, say, Michael Snow, Malcolm Grice or Maya Deren long before I actually saw any of their work.

All this is changing - fast and radically. My first actual experience of Snow's legendary and ground-breaking Wavelength was seeing it in chunks on YouTube.

Now I discover that the whole thing is available on one of our favourite sites, the fabulous archive of underground art which is Ubuweb. Ubuweb is part of what we've termed the Intellectual Long Tail, with apologies to Chris Anderson. By this we're simply referring to the fabulous wealth of intellectual material - art, film, lectures, writing, music, ideas - available since the rise of the web. It's so easy to forget this among the furore about user-generated content and social media.

The question I'll leave you with here is: what will this unprecedented access to underground film have on a future generation of film makers growing up right now?