Circuits, Reels and Actions:Artists’ Moving Image in 1970s Edinburgh

DOWSER is a series of newly commissioned essays, interview transcripts and archival materials which makes available, for the first time, a collated set of resources from which we might begin to plot a history of artists’ moving image in Scotland. Issue 2 (Autumn 2020) features media archivist and researcher Adam Lockhart’s “Circuits, Reels and Actions: Artists' Moving Image in 1970s Edinburgh.”At the outset of cultural devolution in the 1970s, helmed by determined promoters like enfant terrible Richard Demarco and the staff of the nascent Scottish Arts Council, Edinburgh became the original seat of an avant-garde in Scotland. Adam Lockhart's new essay maps a series of key turns in this decade, offering a set of historical fieldnotes for further study and celebration. This commission is illustrated in full colour by a number of archival photographs, including some previously unpublished images from the Demarco Digital Archive