Your Friend, Dimitri Karakostas

¹ This archive will never be ‘complete’ due to years of negligent organization, losing hard drives in airports, and the eventual process of digital forgetting. When I say ‘digital forgetting,’ i’m talking about locked accounts, lost image hosting logins, lapsed webhosting. I’m talking about the removal of the old to make space for the new. As time progresses, more Terms of Service (ToS) are introduced to corral media into easily monetizable vessels – and I am somehow always in violation of these community standards. Posts get deleted, accounts get suspended, and the rest gets lost in the desert of unindexed html. There is also an angle of ‘purposeful forgetting,’ which sounds better than ‘omitting certain projects because I am not on good terms with previous collaborators.’² That sounds negative but it’s not intended to be. It’s a commentary on growing up, on getting older. Don’t get me wrong, there is some very good work hidden in the past but I feel like it should stay hidden for the time being. Another, albeit less nice sounding, reason for this page to never be ‘finished’ is that I can’t imagine ever being done.³ I started this revised archive on August 11th, 2022 – knowing very well that I did not have time to finish it. I just needed to clean up the previous archive,⁴ which ran from 2017-2022. It was good, sure – but still too incomplete. Hopefully, as my last attempt at self-archiving, this page will expand over time to include various minor tasks and accomplishments that I would have otherwise forgot. In a perfect world, this website will eventually resemble a deep chrono.⁵ At the time of writing this footnote, I doubt that i’ll touch this website until the wintertime. I have other things to do.⁶

² Now, when I say I am ‘not on good terms’ with anybody, i’m slightly exaggerating. I’m playing up the character, you see. Sure, i’ve gotten rid of tons of work – of ex-lovers and ex-friends – but I do not consider this to be an act of malice. On the contrary, I believe this to be a mutually beneficial agreement for all concerned parties. No need to dwell on the past. In lesser cases, specific names will be redacted in lieu of a complete disavowal of a project I deem chronologically useful.

³ I hate to drone on this idea, but I must explain that my ‘work’ is never about the singular piece: it is always about the collective ‘whole.’ As a result, I do not believe this archive will ever be finished – there is always more detail to go into, something new I haven’t added, another zine that I don’t own a copy of.

⁴ The previous archive was built to replace a lesser archive, which ran seamlessly from 2008-2016. The problem with both of them was that they were still too heavily curated, too identity-based. I was still too concerned with conveying myself in a ‘specific manner’ which would make me suitable to work for whatever magazine I was hounding. It wasn’t about the work – it was about me. The hope with this iteration, with it’s unspectacular form, is to gradually expand and ‘make some of these projects more clear’ without being concerned about presentation or context. All of the early descriptions of projects are transcribed from a phone conversation – no frills, no in-depth analysis. It just needed to get started because I know it will never be finished.³

⁵ ‘A deep chrono is the verbatim extraction of all the intelligence on a given subject, organized by date. Its purpose is to reconstruct an accurate history of a major event or the history or movements of someone under surveillance. New information is always incorporated into the existing data in exact chronological order, by date and time; until it is complete, its compilers make no attempt reconcile contradictions. Gradually, as more and more information is added to the timeline, a pattern emerges. The chronology tells the story almost every time.’

⁶ I moved to the country – I’m working on a ‘normal book’ for a ‘normal audience.’

This is the complete¹ archive of work by your close personal friend, Dimitri Karakostas.

This is the complete¹ archive of work by your close personal friend, Dimitri Karakostas.