A Story With No Title, A Street With No Name
Hello Friends:
Today’s article takes us on a journey to rescue something from the fuzzy memory of the internet, a project that had Clive Barker create the beginning of a story, for Kaleidospace visitors to add to and continue. If you missed it or have no recollection of it, that’s quite alright, this was back in the early days of the internet, when few people were still using it compared to how ubiquitous it is today. I started getting online about 30 years ago in 1994/95. That’s right, in terms of the internet I am a Boomer.
Going to the official Revelations website, it seems the short text Clive wrote is archived there of course, but the memory of what the website looked like, who else submitted to this story and how it evolved, are now lost to time as this website went down around 2001. Let’s see if we can dig into our archives and with the help of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (WBM), see what we can rescue, shall we?
Now the critical thing for anyone to be able to use the WBM is to have a specific link to a website or page to paste in there and see if the bots crawled it and put it into the archive at some point. That was the first hurdle; the website isn’t around anymore and there were no other pages linking or mentioning the old website from 1995, where I might get that URL. However! Jumping to the rescue, was a chaotic and unorganized bunch of digital files, scraps of paper and bookmarks that I have gathered over the years (let’s call it my version of the Reef), so I went to that hard drive and located that almost by accident within a few minutes. Success! Now we can begin.
Kaleidospace was a website created by Jeannie Novak in 1993, after having some trouble finding a record company to release her upcoming solo album of modern classical piano. These were really early days of the World Wide Web, when websites were small and programmed in basic HTML, Google wasn’t a thing for another 4 years, and people in America were using their shiny AOL discs and their phone lines to uh,… “surf the information superhighway.” According to their website and the article:
Online since March 1994, Kaleidospace (“Kspace”) promotes and distributes independently-produced art, music, film, performance, artist resources, crafts and software from over 500 individuals and groups worldwide. […]
Artists-in-Residence – While Kspace was created for independents, from time to time high-profile “signed” artists make an appearance through the Artist-in-Residence program. A-i-Rs do not sell through the site, but cooperate with Kspace in promotion. Typically, A-i-Rs are “independently-minded” artists who share respect for independent artists and looked to Kspace for their early contact with the Internet community. Current and past A-i-Rs include musicians Tom Jones, Thomas Dolby, horror/fantasy writer Clive Barker, musicians Medicine, JACKOPIERCE, Dr. Fiorella Terenzi, writer Dr. David Brin and illustrator P. Craig Russell.
In the archived Press Release section of the website we can see Clive joined their Artist-in-Residence program in March of 1995, so I imagine this text was created around that time. His page also featured links to a very low resolution video Candyman featurette, along with interviews with cast/crew and an excerpt from the script:
Clive Barker–renowned horror writer and artist–is executive producer of the new Gramercy Pictures release, Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh, which is based on his short story “The Forbidden.” In addition to showing sneak previews and behind-the-scenes interviews of Candyman, the Kspace Artist-in-Residence program is pleased to announce that Clive Barker is also sharing unpublished collaborative fiction and original works of art!
There were 13 submissions published, above is a gallery of screenshots from that archived website (remember web page background textures?) and they even had a graphical map of the story, so you understand how the submissions chained together. Of course there were a bunch of part 2 submissions but there were a few chapters that actually connected to each other:
Personally, from just looking at the names above, I only recognized Author Steve Rasnic Tem, current winner of a British Fantasy Award, a World Fantasy Award and four Bram Stoker Awards.
I’ve managed to compile the different parts into a 46-page PDF you can download here, for archival purposes. I hope you enjoy it.
Sound off in the comments or Discord what you think of it, if you read through its branches, I will do the same.
Thanks for Listening.
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