Primer

From June 2022 until its untimely end in September 2024, a little-known social media called cohost.org flourished within a niche. The website, run by the four members of the apty-named "Anti Software Software Club", was founded on principals of anti-advertising, anti-capitalism, and anti-censorship.

It attracted many outsider & countercultural artists who had found the contemporary internet to be a hostile and unwelcoming place, and provided a space to meet, create, and ultimately foster community. These artists were a diverse array of analog, digital, furry, fandom, fetish, pornographic, photographic, and traditional physical media artists, many of whom were some flavor of trans and queer. Cohost was an oasis to escape to amid an increasingly dystopic digital world; however brief, escapism was a fundamental component of the Cohost zeitgeist, and intrinsic to the art it fostered. Unique styles soon began to coalesce, even birthing a satirical music genre called "love honk," which incorporated car horns together with 80's style FM synthesis. Nearly a year after the social media's demise, many of these artists have stayed in touch, namely through an array of "life raft" discord servers.

While the original website was active, a particular vibrant subgroup bloomed around the organizational tags "# coho film club" & "# coho digi club". Although there were no steadfast rules for entrance into these "clubs", the art in these tags was united by principals of weirdness, queerness, forethought, magical realism, yes-and-ism, a concept retroactively labeled and an overall undeniable human handmadeness. Generative "AI" found no quarter within this social media; emphasis on analog techniques, film photography, DIY darkroom, glitch-art techniques, anachronism, and deliberate imperfection were encouraged, while concepts of "perfection" and palatability were discouraged. "Members" of the two photography clubs frequently employed mediums such as instant films, subminiature films, digicams, false color, and nonvisible light photography— most notably infrared. While many of us did not know it at the time, we were beginning to foster our own little art photography movement together. Much of our art was and continues to be bound together and cross-influenced by threads of similar ideology.

As a collective born during this unique and ephemeral moment of internet history, this periodical zine is comprised of work made both during Cohost's period of activity, and in the wake of its closure. The artists repressented herein believe strongly in the power of physicality, both inherently and in pointed defiance of the sanitized realities of the current digital age. It is our hope that this zine can facilitate our art's continued existence, spread it beyond its now-shuttered originating niche, and be seen by those who will find new resonance with our ideas. It is our sincerest hope that this zine repressents not a memorial to our former club, but a new beginning and path forward for our art to flourish.

draft updated 4/9/25

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