It has, it’s like Doctor Who; the acting gets bad so we have to regenerate every now and then! OMSK was started in 1995 by four people; myself, a performer and video maker called Paul Elliot, who now does the Blunt Club which moves around, a DJ called Lovely John Kasbard who actually still performs under that name and a painter called Serena Sussex. Essentially Paul and I started to do these events called the Karni Club where I showed my films, he did live comedy and it was a bit like a showcase. We were just fresh out of Art College. Then this guy John approached us from the audience and said, ‘I do this thing called ‘Soundtrackerama where I take Mondo sleazy films and I rescore them with records’. And he said ‘I want to play at your event.’ At this point we decided to form a new event and the idea of the event was that it would have equal parts sound, film, video and live. We only did a couple of events under that kind of formation and we started out at a place called the Reingold Club in Bond Street, which doesn’t exist anymore. It was a German club, they used to bring out steaming sausages from the back room to the German clients that had no interest in the art at the other end of the bar.

Then we did a couple of not very good events at the Conway Hall, the ethical society. They are always interested in anarchist free press stuff, so they liked us. So we did a few events there but all these first events were in one room, and it didn’t work. It made it inevitably more theatrical because you’d have films and then we’d move the screen or change the lights and then you’d have live performers but it was all in the same space and the seats were always the same. None of us particularly liked that. There were a number of other film groups that were going on in town like the Exploding Cinema, and the Halloween Society, etc. So there was a meeting of all the film groups.

No, not at all. There was a lot of politics kicking around at the time because Exploding Cinema were very anti the Co-op and they used to picket outside the Co-op. I used to show my films at the Co-op and in fact I used to do film nights there before OMSK. I always had ambivalent feelings about the Co-op. It felt as though you either participated in it and got to know its idiosyncrasies, its benefits and its charms, or somehow you were left out. And there was always that problem with the Co-op; which I think there is with any Co-op, that you are either really active or you feel a bit like you don’t know how to enter it.

Anyway with Exploding Cinema and other such groups we formed this meeting and out of it came the Volcano Underground Film Festival, which was a coalition of ten groups. What was really happening with Volcano was an agreement to stop bitching about each other because we weren’t the enemy; the enemy really was the Bette Midler film premiering at the London Film Festival. So we stopped being quite so difficult internally and formed this festival. We decided to do this festival in November so all of us had to organise an event to fall within two weeks. We did this OMSK event in a disused Barclays bank, which is now a restaurant in Shoreditch. What was good about the space was that it had three floors and all these different rooms, so we could give musicians rooms and we could have film rooms. That was the inaugural event for me and it was much more evident to me that the audience was part of the art because of the way they decided what to go to. And obviously you can’t have that in a cinema. A cinema is a different space and a gallery is a different space but when you’ve got lots of different spaces and it isn’t sanctioned, the audience is more activated. Sometimes people would dig into the film rooms, sometimes people would just stay talking in an installation space and I liked that.

We didn’t have our own building and we didn’t have the kudos or the connections to get somewhere for that long, so we were necessarily itinerant. We almost always changed venue between events so that also changes the way people react to you. Obviously the London Co-op was always in the same building but with OMSK there’s always the question ‘where will OMSK be this time?’

There is also the relationship between art and a gig which is a really uncomfortable one. That’s why some people misinterpreted us, some people used to call us ‘art in parties’, ‘art in clubs’, I hated that because the work is really important to us. We didn’t want people to think ‘it’s just a piss up with a bit of video in the background’. That’s not how it works, but it does have the format of a night out. It starts at 8pm and usually goes until 2am, which is not how you’d normally go to a gallery or to a film screening. Maybe it’s because we used to go to the Scala, when I was in my teens and the Scala was like an event. You’d have like a hip flask of whisky or something and your fags and you’d turn up at midnight and people would be smoking in the cinema and you’d walk out in the middle of the film because you were bored, much more like a live encounter with a film. It was always important that OMSK was durational but only in one night or one day. There is something to the carnival attitude where you turn up and you build something, let it take off and then collapse. If it runs for a week it doesn’t become OMSK.

That’s a very good question. I can’t answer that very easily. Sometimes we'd do events because we felt like doing one, and then we wouldn’t have enough work. Sometimes the artists were pushing the event. This is the thing that OMSK turned into. It stopped being about the work of people who organised it and it turned more into a platform. We found that artists and filmmakers would come to us and say, ‘I’ve got something that I really want to show at OMSK’. For artists it wasn’t like taking it to a cinema or to a gallery, it was much more of a testing ground. So sometimes an event would find itself because of energy coming from the artists but mostly it was a balance of the two. We’ve got boxes and boxes of tapes and DVDs, I get sent work all the time. But it doesn’t mean I’ll put them in an event because it takes a lot of energy to put on an event.

OMSK is very participatory. There are two pieces of art in OMSK, there’s art from the artists and then OMSK as the art. I don’t want to get too sort of high and fleeting about that, but my point is that quite often you’ll find that the audience may love some work and hate some other work but they like OMSK because they see OMSK as something that is more than the sum of its parts. My point is that some artists or filmmakers were just sending out DVDs and they might come down and bring some friends and have a good night, and there are other artists, filmmakers or musicians who really wanted to generate work for that space and wanted to actually put some of their ideas into how to make that space. That’s how we formed the collective.

I got burned out from doing too many events, so was going to kill it. We did ‘the death of OMSK’ in 1998. We did all this campaigning saying OMSK is dying please come and pay your last respects. What happened was all these artists came forward and said, ‘does it have to die?’ So we formed this exceptional meeting and about twenty artists that had shown work came to it and we formed a collective, and that changed a lot. People come and go all the time. Some people would generate a few pieces of work off the back of OMSK and maybe they will travel a bit with OMSK and then they’ll move on, and other people, like Hannah Metcalfe, for instance, who is one of the core collective has been in OMSK for nine years. She actually uses the event as a way of evolving her practice.

Yeah. Before then it was really completely ad hoc and the thing is it got a bit of a tail wind. After we did the event at a bank that so many people came to, we got loads of word of mouth thing about it. We did this event at the 333, which you probably know as a bit of high street disco now, don’t print that, but at the time, they were just doing club nights on a Friday and Saturday. We asked to use the whole space on a Thursday but not as a club and they agreed. By the time we’d done our second or third event there we had 600 people come and it was actually too much. It went on for eight hours over four rooms. When some of the people who had shown their work got involved they were a bit more sensible about it and we actually tried to make a manifesto, which is always being argued over.

Yeah, it did beg a lot questions like, ‘What is OMSK? What kind of work fits into OMSK? What isn’t OMSK?’ all that sort of thing, which we’re still debating. ‘Do we curate?’ is a question that is always asked and I think we don’t know. I’ve certainly shown work that I didn’t like, but I felt that it fitted into OMSK. We certainly don’t have themes. We just have this clumsy manifesto which we are trying to improve that loosely says we’re open to you if you’re trying something out, playing with the form of your work and you don’t mind the audience being heavily implicated or quite responsive. We always disagreed vehemently within the collective. Some of us would hate something that had gone on and some people said it’s absolutely what we’re about. And that kept us fresh I think.

I think it made it better for the artists. We started to be more considered about how to take care of the people we were showing, to have more of a concept around how we used the space and whose work would work against whose work. Before, when we did those events at the 333 it was really like a carnival. People were queuing for half an hour to get in, and some guy queued up, got in, liked it, went home and got his slide projector and some of his slides, queued again, and without asking anybody, just set it up and showed slides in a room, because he felt it fit the environment. We didn’t mind it at the time; but I think after we formed this collective, you could say we were maturing. Two of our core members were doing PhDs both of them in performance art, I started teaching and the situation was changing for the rest as well.

When we had this group of artists together with diverse practices but all of who believed in this very unique space outside of the rarefied art gallery you can have very rich conversations about what it is and where it should go. Whereas before it was just a couple of us and we just threw it all together. I think the events have got better actually; they are a little bit less unruly. And the result of that was a number of things. We got Arts Council funding and then London Arts funding and lottery funding, which wasn’t necessarily great. I mean we were fortunate to get it, but I think that changed the nature of the event because we were commissioning people to generate work, and that put a pressure on the artists to do something whereas usually with OMSK it’s much more for people are already making the work, so that changed it. But we did tour, we went to Norway, we went up to Edinburgh, we went to Greece, and that simply can happen if you’ve got enough people to share duties. I think we just did more and better events. Some people would take on a London event and some people would put in a grant application, so it was more like a family. But I think if you asked audience members, they wouldn’t really have noticed much difference because the work was always quite edgy.