I’ve always had my feet set in two different camps: one in the world of technology, and one in the creative world. I think I’ve never really been more on one side than the other, and I sometimes feel less than adequate in either camp. Maybe I’m “human middleware”, the Jack of all trades and the master of none.
Growing up, I saw myself as stuck in the middle between my parents, with my Dad’s technical, materialist, practical outlook on one side, and my mother’s more emotional, expressive, artistic background on the other side.
My folks were opposites in many ways to my young eyes: I saw my Dad’s family full of technical tradesmen, involved in communications and power systems, and my Mum’s family involved in performance and music. He was technical and she was creative, and I felt like I was in the middle somewhere, too young to know my direction, and strongly interested in modern electronics, science fiction, movies, and comic books.
By my second and third years in art school, I began to accept my schism and I realized that my views of the art world were outdated and biased towards all the old media that I’d seen in paintings and illustration.
As I kept studying modern art history, I learned about artists using new materials and industrial processes, and appreciated the creative passion at work in all kinds of industrial design and architecture. I learned how functionality would determine the positive form in designed things, and how powerful this could be for integrating new ideas and paradigms into culture. The more I looked into designed things, how they were manufactured and how their users’ needs were anticipated or accommodated, I recognized the design at work inside the creativity, and the creativity at work inside of the design.
Instead of fretting over one particular discipline or medium of study, I took an array of courses in subjects that interested me, like drawing, art history, computer graphics, and multimedia. Some of the courses I took in my third year were even similar to the ones I’d taken the year before. The differences in the subsequent year were the people in the class, the advancements of ideas, and also within myself, with what new ideas I could bring with me.
In second year, my Multimedia Studies class had mostly been concerned with photography and media theory. In the third year version of the course, the same instructor, Gary Lee Nova, taught an expanded version of the course in an all-day format, with lecture and discussion during the morning three hour block and experiential hands-on work during the afternoon three hour block, supported and co-taught by the college’s audio-visual technician. This was probably the best example I could think of where creativity and technology got merged in a common creative pursuit.
I think the Advanced Multimedia Studio all-day class was Gary’s brainchild. Gary was a multimedia artist active in painting, printing, film, and sculpture throughout the 60s and 70s, who brought to us his deep academic and working knowledge of media theory and human perception. His focus was on 20th century media like radio, television, and computers, perhaps inspired by the MIT Media Lab and Stewart Brand’s writings on the growing convergences of those media in the past twenty years.
It was an amazing class, a project-driven studio learning experience that gave us all richer learning and a deeper appreciation of core ideas.
The most memorable project we had involved everyone in the class, collaborating on an old-style radio play, recorded live from scripts that we’d each written. There was a framing device of a pirate radio station that was broadcasting from offshore in the middle of a storm, and about 8 different little sequences which would be the programs broadcast by the station. We had long loops of quarter inch tape playing continuous ocean and seagull sound effects, live mics, and our instructor Gary giving us our cues as our floor director. Probably what I liked about it the most was that we all had to work together to get it done. We had to write and plan, set up all the equipment, perform on cue, and help each other through the process. The boundaries between technology and performance became very blurred when it all came together.
In the years since, I’ve learned to appreciate and navigate that fuzzy media middle-ground even more, seeing how important the fusion of the creative and the technical sides can be in disciplines like movie making, software engineering, and game design.
