Opening early 2027
The Archive
Performances, photographs, interviews, publications and historical material that connect the art’s past to its present. It is being assembled now, in the open, and it opens in full in early 2027.
What is in it already
-
1,060 works
The bibliography of the art: books, manuals and pamphlets, each one sourced, with 497 covers photographed.
-
244 ventriloquists
Research dossiers, 66 of them written out in full, each fact carrying its source.
-
1,061 cataloged images
Figures photographed and recorded with maker, mechanics, materials and dimensions, across 34 maker galleries.
-
Ask the Archive
Put a question to Dusty Backlog and he searches the corpus rather than guessing at an answer.
What is coming
Performance video, filed under the person who gave it rather than scattered across a platform. Show programs, press notices and trade-paper runs. Interviews, including ones that exist on tape and have never been transcribed. Photographs that are currently in private hands and in danger of going in a skip.
Most of that material is not ours. It belongs to families, to collectors, and to performers who kept a box of it. Which is the honest reason this page exists before the archive does.
No single person has the whole history.
A photograph in a drawer. An old show program. A story told backstage that nobody thought to write down. Together we have enough to build a fuller, more accurate record than any one collection could.