In the 1980s, I ran a small bulletin board system (BBS) from my parents' garage called:
.::::::::::. .::::::. .::::. .:::::. .:::::::::. .::::. .::::. .:::::. .::::. .:::::.
`:::::/\::::' :::/\::: :::/\:: ::/\:::: `:::::/\::' :::/\:: :::/\:: ::/\:::: :::/\:: :::/\:::
::::/ \::: ::/ \:: ::/ \:: :/__\:::: ::::/ \: ::/ \: ::/ \:: :/__\::: ::/ \: ::/ \::
::::\ /::: ::\ /:: ::\ /:: :: ::::: ::::\ /: ::\ /: ::\ /:: :: :::: ::\ /: ::\ /::
:::::\/::: ' :::\/::: :::\/::: :: ::::: :::::\/: :::\/: :::\/::: :: :::: :::\/: :::\/::'
-=S=A=N=C=T=U=A=R=Y=- BBS/1986
Users connected one at a time to a simple menu:
[D]ownloads
├── demos/ < where misfits made beauty
├── games/ < shared, not sold
├── texts/ < ideas too strange for school
└── warez/ < flowing between outsiders
└── hidden/ < for those who didn't fit
└── elite/ < for those who found each other
all moving
through phone lines
in the night
between bedrooms
across borders
Limitations shaped everything online at the time. Simple ASCII characters – ╔ ═ ╗ ║ – formed interfaces, identities, and ways of marking time and space in the digital night. Each character held multiple meanings, each connection multiple layers of exchange.
Locally in Denmark, we were a handful of regulars, honing our technical skills and sharing anything interesting or forbidden. But the BBS connected us to something larger. Each small local board was a node where underground knowledge mixed and merged. Each ASCII character contributed to larger visual languages, each protocol to shared patterns of trust and exchange.
Late at night, these networks pulsed with life. Software, cracktros, text files, techniques, political texts – all flowed through the same channels, carried by data packets over phone lines, often accessed in illegitimate ways (or perhaps, a little misdirection involving blue boxes and calling cards). Dashes, slashes, and brackets combined into new meanings, just as isolated teenagers with modems formed communities. Between the static of phone lines and the glow of screens, German, Danish, and US voices mingled in conference calls, sharing the same boredom, restlessness, and desire for something beyond—finding more in common with each other than with their own streets.
To me this energy still resonates in artist-run spaces I see today, in the informal structures where local versions of global connections and grassroots networks emerge. People make do with what they have, finding each other through shared frequencies of discontent and hope. Just as we used the hardware and protocols of global corporations to imagine other uses, other networks, other possibilities—our dreams shaped by the very limitations they sought to overcome. Just as I and those with whom I identify now try to imagine different art worlds from within the comfortable habits of the existing one.
Back then we thought that we glimpsed a different future in the static of dial-up and the glow of CRT screens—a future that was both local and global but never came about. A future now lost beneath today’s internet’s seamless surfaces and monetized interactions - but the echoes of those early connections, that shared discontent, still resonate in the decentralized protocols of the Fediverse and peer-to-peer networks that live on at the fringes of global tech infrastructure, just as artist-run spaces persist at the edges of the art world. Reminding me that our current reality and future isn’t fixed and we can still imagine and enact another. These spaces at the margins - digital or physical - hold and transmit vital knowledge of other possibilities, other ways of being, other futures still waiting to emerge. And so I continue to look to these margins, not to the self-declared centers, for solutions and inspiration - finding hope in the spaces where people make do with less but dream of more.
