Editorial 15 April 2019

Welcome and farewell. Farewell to RealTime, a 25-year publishing adventure that has come to a celebratory conclusion and welcome to the RealTime Archive, a massive documentation of a period of remarkable transformation driven by the artists who inspired us and to whom we and our many writers creatively responded. This will be a living archive with new overview essays and content guides coming online and enriched by UNSW Library’s wonderful exhibition In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, which features in this edition.

This final edition of RealTime celebrates the launching on 17 April of the archiving of the complete print editions 1994-2015 on the National Library of Australia’s TROVE website. The digitisation was initiated by UNSW academics and the UNSW Library which formed a partnership with the NLA, both institutions recognising the cultural and historical value of RealTime. We are deeply grateful for their support.

Improving the overall archive, we’ve upgraded the RealTime website, a treasure house of all editions placed online 1994-present, numerous features, a host of audio and video delights and some new content.

RealTime has been a way of life for us, of deep immersion in worlds conjured by adventurous artists across Australia and beyond. As art wondrously and radically mutated over the last 25 years, via experiment, hybridity and reaching beyond itself into science and numerous other fields, it changed the ways we receive and respond to it and, as writers, how we expressed the experience. We write about this in our essay for the In Response: Dialogue with RealTime catalogue. Our thanks to everyone who has been involved in RealTime — writers, artists, staff, Board members, funders and readers. Enjoy the archive and let us know how we can help you explore it. Virginia & Keith

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Top image credit: Vitrine containing copies of RealTime print editions, In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, UNSW Library, 2019, photo Keith Gallasch