Trying to Understand Media

In my second year of ECCAD, I took a multimedia course, wanting to learn about different kinds of media.

In the mid-80s, media was analog or photo-mechanical, via audiotape, photography, or early 8mm videotape. Computer technology had not even begun to permeate other forms of media yet, and desktop computers (microcomputers as they were known) and computer graphics were still rudimentary, to say the least.

The analog and digital worlds were not compatible, and ways to digitize analog media were still evolving in the marketplace. To the average consumer, digital video and nonlinear editing didn’t exist yet. The world-wide web was still ten years away, and CDROM discs were not yet commonly used for data storage. Everything seemed to be recorded on paper, magnetic tape, or photographic film. It must sound like the stone ages to young, millennial ears, I’m sure. The world of media seemed very strange and fragmented to me, and I wanted to know how it worked and was used to make and say things.

Multimedia class itself seemed like a work-in-progress: for our first class, I remember maybe ten students sitting around a long folding table in an empty classroom. The instructor was a very articulate speaker named Gary Lee-Nova. I learned later that Gary was an artist who’d worked since the sixties in a variety of media from painting, printmaking, and collage, to sculpture and 3D construction, through to audio, film, and video. Gary struck me as something of an intellect and he intimidated me a little. Between assignments, when I had time to look in the mirror, I still struggled with feeling like an imposter as an art student. I felt like I was playing catch-up most of the time: catching up to the ideas and opinions I heard around me, catching up on completing whatever assignment that was coming due, and struggling to catch up on meals and sleep.

I reckoned that Gary was the most media-savvy person in that college, and I wanted to learn what he was talking about. Gary spent time in each class giving us some multimedia history, and theoretical grounding, from the theories of Marshall McLuhan through to modern mass media and culture. After that, we’d be given some practical exercise. It was an attempt at teaching media literacy in both theoretical and applied ways.

One practical exercise we were given was to shoot images onto slide film with an SLR camera. I’d been surrounded by photos and slides of one kind or another throughout my life: Poppy, my mum’s dad, had shot a thousand snapshots and slides. In our family, seeing someone holding a little pocket camera or a polaroid instant camera had been so common to me growing up that I’d never even thought about it. Accepting it came as automatically as the pictures that were shot. People aimed a little camera, said cheese, and clicked a button. A few weeks later after you’d forgotten all about it, someone would pull out an envelope and pass all the photos around, and we’d all smile and say “ooh”. Happy memories.

I’d clicked the button on little Kodak instamatics before, but I’d never shot onto a roll of film using a good quality camera before. I wasn’t a photography student, but this seemed more like some kind of essential skill I needed to have, especially if I wanted to develop my portfolio further. The professional way to document one’s art for their portfolio was to shoot slides of it.

I signed out an SLR  camera from the college’s audio-visual crib and read the instructions in its package. It was kind of thrilling to wind in some film, snap the body closed, and play with the controls. I decided to leave it on auto, find something interesting to look at, and concentrate on framing and keeping things looking sharp and focused.

I ended up in the downtown part of Granville Street, walking down alleys and climbing up fire escapes to get what I thought were interesting shots of chimneys, metal ducts, and worn brick walls. I was also just curious about those less-seen spaces above street-level. I liked seeing the cracks and crannies where the city showed its age in its worn-down edges and little scars, like how an old wrinkled face tells so much more of a life story than a pristine young face can. There were deep, well-earned, real life-lines there to be read.

A few days later once I picked up my slides from the photofinisher, I obsessed over them, going through their appearance, and even the feel of the little plastic frames and the smell of the newly-developed slide film. It took me back to Poppy’s many old slides in their cardboard frames, printed with the word “Kodak”. We had boxes of those which I’d managed to preserve through quite a few changes of address. With those first slides, I may have realized that I’d taken a few tentative footsteps in Poppy’s shadow.

More about artist and educator Gary Lee-Nova:

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