Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Welcome!

Back in the early days of the Internet, one of the very first pages I put up online was a little thing I called the Synchronicity Arkive. I was newly graduated from college, and had found my way to the rec.arts.pink-floyd newsgroup. There, I stumbled across a discussion of the incredible synchronicity created by pairing Pink Floyd's seminal album Dark Side Of The Moon with the film The Wizard Of Oz. Since a common pastime for us in college had been matching up a variety of videos to music (mostly Pink Floyd, but some others), the idea immediately caught my imagination.

And so the Arkive itself was born. After a while, I stumbled across others who had created similar pages. We began to link up, and a community was born. Then, in 1997, the mainstream media (finally having awoken to the Internet) found us, and the Arkive went nuts. I remember the day I first checked my hit counter, and it had jumped by about a 1000 from the day before. I thought it was an error, but when I reloaded it was up another 2000. Then 5000. It just started spinning basically.

And with the addition of a message board script, the SynchBoard allowed that community to become a very vibrant and heated discussion area.

The media quickly lost interest, and over time, people did move on. But a core of community always stuck around, and even survived the migration from the SynchBoard over to Baker B's Film/Album Synchronicity Board. Then back to the Arkive again when Baker decided to step back just as my nostalgia was kicking in.

Unfortunately, the Arkive did not survive some of the turmoil in my personal life, but once again I find myself nostalgic for that community, from the early days of the net. And after reaching out, a new Synchronicity Arkive idea began to take shape. This time, a group blog to look into the history of audio/visual synching (which was a preview in a lot of ways of today's rip/remix culture), as well as what some of that old community is up to today.

So, welcome. There isn't much here yet, but hopefully that will change, over time. We can't recapture the past necessarily, but we can remember it. And learn from it. Every journey begins with a single step... but we always bring with us where we've been. Here's to synching... keep on keeping on!!