The Old Police House (TOPH): Treatise

ABSTRACT In the thick of austerity, small arts communities are tested to the brink. The Arts in the North of England had been hit with staggered funding cuts, almost halving resources available from arts funders, arts organisations and the councils. In 2013, the largest DIY space in Newcastle was forced to move, closing for 2 years whilst Morden Tower, a building rich in artistic heritage, fell in to such disrepair it was forced to close. A hole was left. The Old Police House, a small DIY rehearsal space for a DJ project in Gateshead, was just that. An old police house without heating or funding that, in response to community needs, became a make-shift venue and home to several young artists and projects. Seven years on with two venue moves, two changes of Prime Minister, the threat of a super-council looming over ‘Newcastle-Gateshead’ and competing programmers, what impact does DIY art have? How has the local artistic community changed? Do equity and equality still exist in a climate of prescriptive narratives from Arts Funders, tick-box feedback forms and tokenistic funding? This paper proposes to explore the challenges of running an urban experimental community arts venue within this cultural context, drawing on the authors’ personal experiences as an active participant.

'The first ingredient is the desire of a group of friends to want to get together and have some fun.' (Lawrence 2013) Based in Gateshead, The Old Police House is a collective, voluntary run project involving Adam Denton, Mark Wardlaw and Mariam Rezaei.Since 2012, The Old Police House (hereafter: TOPH) has been an outpost of internationally focused experimental sonic life in the North East of England, producing gigs, clubs and other arts activities from its initial base in the former police chief's building in Gateshead and other venues.Run on love and a commitment to what we'd prefer the world to be like, TOPH's programming is informed by three fundamental questions: 'what do we think is lacking or needed, how can we do it, who does it give a platform to?' We also programme the Tusk Fringe, the late night sister event to the main Tusk Festival.Since the first Covid lockdown in April 2020, TOPH has moved online, supporting and expanding its community through an innovative series of streaming events.This article will attempt to identify and contextualise what TOPH was then and is now.Through this process, we are gathering ghosts.The article begins by outlining TOPH's background, noting how the project carved out a non-commercial space for an experimental music community within the context of Gateshead's millennial redevelopment.We argue that TOPH redefined the space, transforming a site of state repression into a largely un-policed place of gathering for the community.We situate TOPH within a tradition of alternative and DIY spaces in the north east of England and further afield, noting how people used the space differently to more conventional venues.To give a flavour of our programming, we highlight several key events at the original Gateshead space and describe our Housebound Series of weekly lockdown broadcasts.In both instances, we note how the programming and performances reflected and responded to the environment and circumstances.We go on to discuss how our experiences of online broadcasting informed the programming and production of TUSK Virtual 2020 and TUSK FRINGE Virtual 2020.
The essay tracks our move from physical spaces dedicated to the live performance of sonic art, augmented by online promotional activity, to the predominantly digital existence of the project today.As we argue, this enforced transition was made possible by what came before, in terms of the physical spaces we occupied and the friendships, collaborations and solidarities that were generated and forged.Moving online has helped us extend those connections, while retaining a sense of place through programming that is rooted in a locale.
What follows can be viewed as something akin to a treatise on TOPH, to show that such a project is possible, and that it could and should happen again.It is a way of us remembering, to understand what was had, what's been lost, and what's been rendered.Others may remember it differently and we hope that those remembrances and resulting antagonisms can be brought forward through the publishing of this article, pointing towards new possibilities of gathering, in a post-Brexit, post-COVID UK.This is a partial and specific remembrance of TOPH-our version could and should be contested.We think of it now as something we would like to see again, whether initiated by us or by others.It is not a blue-print or a model, as the intersecting circumstances and desires that brought it into being could perhaps not be repeated.The location of the place, and some confusion relating to ownership, meant that we were able to run a project that was underground and/or operated between the recognised pillars of our city's dominant cultural ecology.At the time of writing, the physical, lived in, outside world, appears to manifest as a past.Being in places with others now feels distant and to some extent, impossible.

Redefining a Space
'[I]t's really about plotting and scheming; occupying these spaces to reconfigure the architecture, and imbue the architecture with completely different meanings' (Butt, Eshun, and Fisher 2016, 239).
The Old Police House was initially acquired by Mariam Rezaei through Gateshead Council's in-kind support for her DJ project, 'Noisestra'.Commissioned in 2011, the project aimed to reach out to young DJs in the North East.Driven by Rezaei's creative practice with turntables, the project shared DJ skills and experimented with improvisation and composition.The project concluded with an hour-long performance of experimental instrumental and turntablist composition, with 12 young people and professional ensemble, Apartment House.The premiere of the work NOISESTRA, was staged at Sage Gateshead in August 2012, as part of the Cultural Olympiad.The building was entrusted to Rezaei, based on her active community work, and the Noisestra project continued to run regularly after its initially funded phase.
In 2013, TOPH hosted AKAB/Tract, an installation and performance event set against and amidst the post-crash reverberation of increasing austerity and state cruelty in the UK, and specifically the north east of England.The event utilised five of the six rooms in the late nineteenth-century built red brick house, previously occupied by Gateshead's chief of police.Situated just five minutes walk from the River Tyne, the building stands in the shadow of the newly built Tesco development, which had seen the metropolitan council sell off the town centre to the supermarket chain to develop the site.Surrounded and islanded by dissecting dual carriageway ring-roads, the traversable town centre, it can be argued, now resembles a retail park.
Regeneration was on-going in Gateshead, its totems appearing on the banks of the Tyne at the turn of the millennium during the Blair era, only viewable from the opposite side of the river in the more affluent Newcastle, in the form of a centre for music, Sage Gateshead, and the contemporary arts centre, BALTIC.
We found ourselves operating in a time between the two significant development eras of twenty-first century Gateshead.This fore-shadowed the phase where a whole area of historically significant buildings would be sold off to a leisure company to be turned into an 'edutainment' venue, funded by Tier One Capital (Ford 2019).To this day, almost inevitably, those buildings have been left empty and unused.
The site is loaded.TOPH was formed within a cluster of former municipal buildings, including a town hall, a library and a police station.The occupiers and key-holders of these historically potent buildings are contributing to the folklore of the site.They can be party to a continuation of destitute activity, or work towards a reclamation of the space through occupation, gathering and purpose.TOPH was originally located in a place where historically, people were detained and beaten by police.The most notorious instance of this was the killing of Liddle Towers in 1976 (Dimoglou 1978;Hansard 1977).We sought to become the antithesis of this.There was a foundational tenet that, through our activities, we could redefine the former chief of police's residence, transforming it from a scene of state retribution and brutality, to a place of gathering with very little policing at all.
Before it was sold to a property developer, whose interests are of course paramount to its policing, TOPH was fundamentally somewhere for people to be with each other, engage with transformative musics and performance, experiment with styles and modes of existence, and communicate their needs and desires, all facilitated in an ad hoc fashion.Adding to the un-venue-ness of TOPH, the relative tightness of the rooms inside meant patrons would often congregate on the stepped area and road immediately outside.The single-glazed windows and quiet surroundings meant audiences could hear performances from the outside steps with surprising clarity, albeit architecturally filtered.
The rooms of The Old Police House were bare and easily transformed, but retained the immovable architectural character of a three-storey Victorian red brick house.This made for a unique and loaded space for performance and gathering.The specific architecture imposed unavoidable intimacies, in a place where scenes, routed through the locale, or having a nexus point in the locale, could be enriched by visiting performers: that is to say, the facilitation of an outpost for internationally focused translocal sonic activity.In attempting to generate a collaborative and collectively motivated environment, with the friendships of the initiators and a hardcore of peripheral actors as catalyst, TOPH became a physical focal point for distributing the possibilities of a venue that is not a venue and a house that is not a house.Once the former recreation hall of the local police force, this site was repurposed by a group of young punks, its shows and activity partially immortalised in Chris Kilip's photography collection The Station (2020).The Station, like the Morden Tower (a place for poetry and music situated in the mediaeval west walls of Newcastle), is said to have operated without a licenced bar.TOPH can be located in this tradition of other kinds of venues in the city.

Other Kinds of Venues
In the north-east of England and more broadly in the UK, we noticed something was missing: something that we'd seen elsewhere as touring artists.Through our work with TOPH, we became more aware of alternative spaces beyond our geographical region and were able to connect with spaces like The Old Dentists in East London.DIY spaces have existed to challenge how cultures are mediated as they're sold back to us, in the form of contemporary bars, clubs and spaces.Contemporaneously, the operation at TOPH drew on the approach at Audacious Space-a DIY space for music in Sheffield, which has recently changed its name to Hatch.Originally set up as a rehearsal space around 2010, the affiliated musicians of Audacious were dissatisfied with the economic models reproduced by regular venues, and even though cash on the night may have been flowing over the bar, invariably compensation for the artist's work was hard to come by.Due to these frustrations, the members began opening their space as a makeshift venue, where artists would be paid fairly and the space run and administered by its members with a DIY ethos.
These fascinating and unique approaches that are built on a similar but situationally specific ethos, known broadly as the DIY ethos, have become synonymous with DIY as a co-opted aesthetic choice rather than a mutating, generative and undergirding politics.TOPH as a space for socially oriented DIY production was influenced by the types of spaces encountered in mainland Europe through touring, such as Asile 404 in Marseille and Muszi in Budapest, where particular stories and political circumstances surrounding the inception of the space and its continuation helped us learn what was needed to keep things going where we were.
Locally, we had been influenced by Morden Tower, the existence and closing of which overlapped with the beginning and proliferation of TOPH.As Rosie Lewis remarked in an online panel discussion for TUSK Virtual 2020, the Morden Tower existed as Connie Pickard's long term project, not only in terms of the conservation of the building, but the facilitating, nurturing and protecting of the place, ensuring the possibility of a space where experimentation could yield new forms of artistic production and being with (2020).Connie protected the Tower from the advance of financial capital interests in the city centre, and the academicising forces of the market-university complex.
As Foucault points out in his essay, 'Of Other Spaces' (1986), there are 'oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example, between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work' (23).It is here we note, that practitioners must look beyond merely what real estate is made available to them, by developers or municipal officials, and instead consider what they will bring to a location or building that will repurpose it for their communities of need, and antagonise by their very existence the ideologies of land management, ownership and the dichotomy of private/public.
Victories of private ownership and capital were starkly illustrated to us in the form of the Tesco development of Trinity Square and surrounding area in Gateshead, which, due to this act of municipal privatisation, offered the public no legal right of way through the centre of the town.In the shadow of increased land banking, displacement and this architectural development, we should consider what TOPH was not (to us)-it was not specifically a club, venue, or studio, but rather a mutant strain of all of these things.It was understood as a hybrid space by people who needed it or were intrigued by it, but it did 'elude legibility' in terms of the local, industrialised culture scene (de Certeau 2011).
In attempting to create a space that was all of the things detailed above, hard to define and difficult to critically address, we looked to generate a zone of activity for a sorely needed cultural heterogeneity.While occupying a position of opposition/adversary in the face of top-down, hegemonic cultural impositions, we were both comfortable with and compelled to being antagonists of the 'too big to fail' cultural monoliths in Newcastle-Gateshead (a branding initiative created in the year 2000) standing against and between the 'bastions of reasonable culture'.This was reflected in a 2016 performance of Sear, recorded live at Sage Gateshead for BBC Radio 3, where in one section of the piece we sampled the voice of Nigel Farage announcing that he would be visiting the venue for the UKIP conference on St Georges Day (Swarm Front 2016).With this work, we wanted to exemplify the venue's complicity in platforming fascist organisations.

No Bars
Without the focal point of a bar, a night flows differently (Lawrence 2009).It is impossible to talk about other and counter-cultural spaces without invoking David Mancuso's Loft at 647 Broadway New York.Tim Lawrence describes speaking with Mancuso about the ethical and ideological commitments made when organising events at The Loft.For Mancuso, the intention was to contribute to making the world a better place, in that microcosm, in the hope that a wave of utopian and anti-capitalist intention folds outwards (Lawrence 2009).Today, The Loft is a physical space produced by memory, chaotic archiving and an on-going commitment to interconnected and internationally focused local scenes.
Although the culture, era and reason for being are ostensibly different, like the Loft, we would not seek a licence to sell alcohol at TOPH.Instead, we would attempt to facilitate a porous space for people of numerous backgrounds to gather, bringing with them whatever they wished to imbibe, in many cases, to share with others who had assembled for the event.As we did not conduct a survey to gather data on demographic metrics during our time in our first building, it is difficult to officially attest to which categories were represented at TOPH events.We would try to hold a space for associates to create the work they wanted to make and hear, programming friends and artists we'd met while working as touring artists around the United Kingdom and beyond.
If an event runs throughout the day and into the evening, particular relationships to time and duration develop.Encounters between humans and non-humans and the place around which the event is happening can proliferate, generating new understandings of the politics in which they are participating at that time.What has become known as the 'all-dayer' has a long history in global punk scenes where a micro-zone of festivalis is created around the long-form gig.Some attendees will stick around for the whole show, others will drop in and out, or arrive for the portion of the event they're particularly drawn to.
At TOPH we programmed a number of all-day events.The bills would be a mash-up of genre and style, usually featuring several acts from our locale, alongside a touring act or two, who may have got in touch to say that they were looking for a show in the north east of England to aid their touring schedule.This sequence of eventualities may have precipitated the staging of the event itself.With this in mind, it could be said that the event is built around the reality and the idea of welcoming the visitor.
One instantiation of this was an iteration of the Hauskonzert series, promoted by the inimitable experimental harpist, Rhodri Davies.At this joyous gathering of around 20 artists of varied acclaim and approach, a cascade of sonic offerings ran uninterrupted from the early afternoon until the late evening, with the audience donating to gather funds for the Refugee Council (Figure 1).
In August 2017 we were given notice to vacate The Old Police House by the estates department of Gateshead Council, as the building, along with a number of others that made up a unique site of historically loaded architecture, had been sold off for £500,000 to Tier One Capital, a property portfolio fund.Recognising our plight, the nearby Workplace Gallery graciously offered us space, where we continued to operate, albeit with different restrictions and somewhat depleted autonomy, until 2019.

On Digital Distribution and Access
As stated above, TOPH, like much of the world's artistic output, now exists primarily online.That is not to say that we don't imagine making things happen in real life again, but forecasting how that might manifest demands analysis of the current distribution of artistic sonic material.At the beginning of the first UK coronavirus lockdown, TOPH began an online TV series of 'gigs' called 'TOPH Housebound' (2020).Starting on March 27th 2020, each of the 13 shows gave a platform to artists outside of the UK, outside of our region and in our immediate locality.Suddenly, it was necessary for artists to come together in digitised commune, creating spaces where scenes could foster solidarity in the present circumstances.Digitally rendered cross-pollinations helped simulate the gig, with performers and artists making up a large part of the audience in a Twitch chatroom.
Coupled with the uncertainty of what lockdown was really going to mean, the first Housebound online event was an experiment.To mitigate the risks of new logistical challenges, we kept the first bill of artists small, informal and close to TOPH.Newcastle based TOPH artists SW1n-Hunter and KENOSIST both played solo sets whilst Mariam Rezaei DJed between acts.Wild Pop duo Yeah You in Oxford, vocalist Odie Ji Ghast in Gateshead, and harpist TOBEYA in France, contributed through live 'raided' broadcasts and pre-recorded performances.Yeah You gave their performance a radically unique agency: their pre-recorded performance used a car and the outdoors as a performance space, a sound source and a marker of time.With hindsight, this reflected, embraced and virulently challenged ideas of the electronically mediated self, an understanding of hauntology being composed in real time (Dean 2005).It also acted as a premonition to the global lockdowns in 2020, 2021 and beyond.The idea of bearing witness to a performance exponentially explodes, especially when relating it to an idea of duration.Yeah You engaged with a more-than-human world through free improv and immediately pulled at the concept of 'bubbling', preempting a biological contact strategy several months ahead of its UK announcement.For the individual audience at home, time could be interpreted as fast or slow, whereas it is defined, by concept and its presence as an online entity, as finite.The empirical experience of each audience member is intimate and unique, yet the idea of an online performance, a pre-recorded performance and the audience sitting at home viewing this unravels a kaleidoscope of threads in understanding this approach to art making.
TOPH made a conscious decision to programme the first online show with a structure based on IRL gigs, hosted using gamer platform Twitch.Through the Housebound experiments, artists and audiences found new ways of glitching the idea of what the performance to webcam is and can be.Still mixing live and pre-recorded performances, the second Housebound gig on April 3rd, included YOL, Erika Leaman, Cath and Phil Tyler, Angharad Davies, Fritz Welch and DJ Clemency.
Using Skype in combination with Open Broadcaster Software, streaming a live video proved problematic as it glitched and sporadically compressed audio depending on the technical set up.This digital medium presented unforeseen issues and the immediate responses to these were wildly varied.Some audiences expected high quality streaming whilst others embraced the shortfalls of streaming and digital technologies as part of the experience.Nonetheless, the energy of the streamed gig was elating and helped establish a new online community.
The break between real life performances is a vital time for audiences and musicians to mix, for merchandise to be sold and for spaces to be reset.Very quickly, the breaks between acts streamed in an online gig proved to be just as important, helping to foster a new online community in the chat rooms.Artists and audiences were comfortable in contributing to the online gig community and connected with like-minded individuals; interactions that were reminiscent of our initial TOPH space in Gateshead.
Artists and audiences were beginning to talk about the effects and fears of lockdown in both the chatroom and through their artistic output.People felt trapped in their homes, out of touch with reality and some sought out new ways of utilising their surroundings.
YOL submitted a video that showed the viewer inside his home.We were able to see the interior of his kitchen whilst he performed.Showing only his limbs and body, and with sound apparatus on the floor, the video was recorded in one take.There was an unexpected and gratifying intimacy to the performance, where an artist could choose to be transparent and share a close visual of their equipment and performance methods.The close proximity of the camera to the artist performing was jarring, revealing of the artist's practice and almost verging on the forbidden; this happened at a time where human physical contact during a global pandemic was becoming illegal.This exaggerated proximity to the performer is not only unusual in a real-life performance, it is physically impossible.Audiences all had an equal opportunity to be a voyeur and the artists that are filming in this way are consciously welcoming us in.
Housebound 3 brought together another experiment in programming, including new works by Petronn Sphene, John Russell, Ian Watson, Wrest, DJ Jennifer Walton and David Toop.Much akin to the ethos of real life performance, TOPH decided to tighten the logistics of mixing live and pre-recorded performances by adding soundchecks in advance and limiting video streaming quality.The constant variable now became the unstable upload and download connections of the audience's internet.Coupled with old home computers that were not built for excessive high quality video streaming, the streamed results were sometimes very turbulent.
TOPH embraced ideas from the community chat alongside our ethos of programming a wide range of artists.In Housebound 4, Murdo, pet to Ali Robertson of Usurper, was the first special guest cat.There was a 'noise-cookery' show with zine maker and noise musician Chewn-Zine.Whilst continually mitigating poor wifi signal, Chewn-Zine took advantage of the exposing camera views of the kitchen for their performance.When a technical failure meant an artist stream had dropped out in Housebound 5, Erika Leaman quickly contacted TOPH host KENOSIST, and in less than a minute, was live streaming a solo with two guitars, a night sky and a bright magenta Labrys flag as the backdrop.The first large ensemble to perform for TOPH was the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra.Featuring saxophonist Raymond MacDonald and vocalist Maggie Nicols, the performance mitigated the under-developed audio technology of Zoom (2021).The ensemble actively competed for ownership of the Zoom microphone whilst improvising in response to what their individual internet connections would allow them to hear.The resulting combination of the sporadic jumping Zoom microphone, the unstable internet connections and improvisatory responses were magnificently cut up and fragmented.This new form of ensemble interaction, improvisation and music structure is a genuinely innovative and creative approach that started to question multiple ideas, including musical authenticity, human behaviour in groups, interdisciplinary improvisation and the role of audience participation.
TOPH were now part of an online DIY worldwide community alongside other UK promoters such as Cafe Oto (2020).It coalesced and negotiated which weeks' particular performers would play on which stream.The rules of organising and promoting online gigs were changing just as rapidly as the world was.People's perception of time was changing and audiences were making new habits, so scheduling shows on specific days helped provide some structure to the week.It became apparent how necessary community is to the promoters, artists and audiences.Experimenting with outdoors performances on 9th August 2020, TOPH broadcast a live performance of a few, socially distanced artists-Plastiglomerate and Odie Ji Ghast, SW1n-Hunter, Mark McGarry, KENOSIST and Erika Leaman-from an iPhone.This led to a second socially distanced performance in Glasgow on 30th August 2020, including Caroline McKenzie and Vivarium Sounds, who are both members of the emergent online community around TOPH.The Outbound TV series was quickly cut short by a second national lockdown but went on to inform the planning of TUSK Virtual 2020 and TUSK FRINGE Virtual 2020.

TUSK Virtual 2020 and TUSK FRINGE Virtual 2020
TUSK Virtual 2020 was the online iteration of TUSK Festival.Ordinarily held in Gateshead and Newcastle venues, the festival ran from the 28 September to the 11 of October 2020.Programmed entirely in the global lockdown, TUSK Virtual 2020 broadcast new performances from the likes of Sun Ra Arkestra, Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O'Rourke, Gaelynn Lea, DUMA and Matana Roberts, over 14 days.TOPH curated its sixth TUSK FRINGE as a virtual 4 d programme which ran adjacent to the main festival.Featuring artists DRVG CVLTVRE, Shelley Parker, GHÖSH, 2Drunk2Code and YOL, FRINGE was a live broadcast, presented by TOPH members.Despite its digitally dispersed character, the online iterations of both festivals were successful in locating the broadcasts clearly in the locale they were broadcast from, through the programming of artists and work from and of the locale.That is to say, that in this webcasting scenario, both TUSK and TUSK FRINGE managed to retain a sense of place, through archive screening and discussion of places central to the cultural character of the north east of England.Through these pieces, interspersed with talks and performances from all over the world, there was a horizontalisation of the geospatial dimension, which takes on an importance when thinking about translocal connectedness, solidarity in marginal creation and international, heterogenous cultural happenings.There was a sense that the festival was happening in the north east but its import could be connected with from anywhere with an internet connection, which we must continue to consider, isn't everywhere.
In the face of hegemonic cultural policy in the UK, this two week festival was a vital showing of cooperation among its producers and programmed artists.Director of TUSK Festival, Lee Etherington, programmed the festival to include presenters, DJ mixes and new performances alongside archive footage, establishing a familiar format with widely varying results.The festival was live streamed every day, with a 12 h delayed live stream for international viewers.The inclusion of a chatroom on the Vimeo video platform borrowed from TOPH's learning from the online TV Housebound series.The roster of artists were able to interact directly with appreciative and enthusiastic audiences as they communed in a new online space.By holding back the release of the TUSK 2020 digital archive, this online community became actively invested in the festival's ephemeral presence and tuning into the daily broadcasts became habitual.
The significance of the TUSK Virtual 2020 and FRINGE festivals can be further justified by the absence of support or programming from large arts institutions in the North.The recipients of several million pounds in Cultural Recovery Funding, these regularly funded arts organisations were already sustained by multiple funders, yet their programming was mostly on hold throughout 2020.In some instances, hundreds of local musicians and artists were made redundant from their zero-hour contracts, despite institutions keeping large buildings lit up at night.

Routes between Online and Offline Space
As we have mentioned above, much of TOPH's recent online activity occurred through the Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch.It appears that the majority of streaming activity during the lockdown period has utilised the services of platforms such as Youtube and Facebook to host performances and events.There is much to consider when choosing which service to use, but since the large digital oligopolies control much of the available digital real estate that can effectively host video content, the choice is illusory in terms of ethics.
As alternatives to the aforementioned corporations, it is useful to look at small streaming services such as Global Independent Streaming Services (GISS), who have been hosting audio and visual streams since the mid-2000s.GISS maintain that they are neither a 'service' nor a 'company' but rather a platform for 'experimentation and research'.The platform cannot be used for any commercial purpose and there is an editorial rigour when deciding to allow people to stream with the platform, based on the streamers understanding of the platform's existence (Giss.tv2008).
In the case of streaming audio, it is useful to look at the work that developers Rabble are doing with libraries in the US and their MUSICat software.The software aims to encourage libraries to directly support their local artists, by curating and hosting audio work on library systems in places like Seattle, Nashville and Austin.In connecting these locales through their locally produced artistic work, a counter-network of production is being facilitated along with the cataloguing of work that connects to the specific circumstances, conditions and struggles in these areas (Price 2018).
With platforms and services such as MUSICat, a space is opened for genres and scenes to mix at a local and trans-local level through listening.Hybrid forms can be discovered and proliferate, inviting collaborations perhaps that would not have been thought of without this distribution network.This mixing happens at an atomic level where new mutations emerge through exchange.At first, this is the disembodied digital at work as distribution, but this work can be in dialogue with and work towards gatherings in actual space, where these mixings can generate, antagonise and proliferate.With this in mind, these local level repositories could be vital in generating post-carceral manifestations of digitally formed communities.
The connections and manifestation in actual space, from what has seemingly been built online during this pandemic, of course, remain to be seen.How we reconfigure the solidarities experienced in virtual isolation among the types of spaces and assemblies we will turn to as post-traumatic populations will be telling.It is almost impossible to plan for this re-emergence.However, we clearly need places that run as sites of convergence for people making and seeking out creative worlds-places without business plans, operating outside of designated creative zones or quarters.To work out what we are to do next, perhaps we need to establish what Sam Hillmer has referred to as 'places of enquiry' that allow us room and time to learn from each other (Hillmer, Huang, and Kao 2021), from a grassroots and internationally interconnected position.
What we initiated at the beginning of the last decade has served as a pilot of sorts, routed in a tradition of DIY, ad hoc and 'other' spaces that have always been there until they are not, until the challenge is taken up by others, cognisant of what has come before and what, they intuit, is needed now.
As we emerge from the pandemic and seek to gather again, we need places that are difficult to define, code and address, to proliferate.Places that exist between the controlling architectures of urbanised life, and resist the current of a contemporary cultural and political situation.While the internet and streaming possibilities were once viewed as routes to freedom of expression across borders, online platforms now represent the only way of gathering around sonic events in places.With COVID-19 still posing a serious threat across the world and the UK in 2021, we are now forced to be online or otherwise to risk irrelevance.
Adam Denton is a sonic artist and orgnaiser living in London UK.He was an active member of Audacious Space in Sheffield and co-initiator of TOPH in Gateshead/Newcastle.He performs regularly with his solo project SW1n-HUNTER, the Property Unknown group and is a PhD candidate at SARC, Queens University Belfast.
TOPH can be viewed in a historical constellation of alternative venues in the North East that includes Spectro, The Station, The Star & Shadow Cinema, and Morden Tower.Between 1981 and 1985, the celebrated anarcho-punk venue The Station existed on what is now a piece of enclosed wasteland, adjacent to where TOPH was situated.