Please turn off this computer! Today is Shutdown Day

May 3 is a global event which is the "buy nothing day" of computers. The intention is to make people aware of how much of their best time and energy is being spent hunched over a keyboard. Sometimes you can't avoid having to be there -- in fact, if you are reading this at the kiosk at the opening night of the Emily Carr Undergrad Exhibition, 2008, I'm here at a computer myself! This one has been set to run 24/7 for the week of the show, so there IS no way to power down. If you look around right now, you will see me standing here hoping to have a conversation with you about my project, which is this blog. I'm the one dressed in black with the glasses.

But if you are at home, please bookmark this blog and come back tomorrow. Needless to say, today the website itself has been turned off. But come midnight, you could check it out to see reports coming of the many people who participated in the event by joining flashmobs being held around the world. Last year, according to reports, most people spent the 24 hours off from their computer having sex. This year, many will be doing the same, but it is nice to have an alternate. A flashmob gives the opportunity is go out and play with other people with a similar intention to risk taking the time to see how it feels to be out in a world unmediated by a computer screen. Last year I was out writing cherry-blossom haikus, as you can see in my video "Shutdown Day--One Year After" in the April 27 posting below.




2013 Update: Here is a Wikipedia article on Shutdown Day, which ended as an annual event in 2009. 

This blog is my art school graduation project

Tomorrow I graduate from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, in Vancouver, Canada with a Bachelor of Media Arts, and I will be receiving the Governor General's Silver Medal for the best marks in the class. Our graduation project is meant to represent what we currently see as our core creative work, and after much thought, I decided that this blog best represents what I see myself doing as an artist for the near future. It gives me an opportunity to self-publish my own writing and video work, as well as to feature other videos and websites which I think are relevant to the themes I explore here.

Like any artist, I will be trying to represent my own core concerns in a way that resonates for other people. Right now, for me, that concern is about how to have a balanced response to rapid technical change. I came back to school in my mid-fifties, and this gave me a chance to see the relevance of my own work in the context of other art that is being done now. At about the mid-point of my studies I switched to a department where I could learn how to use electronic tools like digital photography and video. I also started putting my work for public view via the Internet, rather than through the more traditional gallery system. As I am about to graduate, I am glad that I have skills and experience which give me the tools and credibility to be taken seriously, as I comment upon the pros and cons of those very tools.

There is a bit of "deja vu" operating here. In my first round as an artist, in my twenties, I worked in what is now called "traditional media" - doing drawings and sculpture. But by the time I was thirty, in the early 1980's, I started to respond to what I called "the writing on the wall". I was part of a group of artists who started an artist run centre called "Toronto Community Videotex" to work together to develop skills to create content for the precursor to the Internet. I am delighted that this organization, now known as InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, has not only survived to celebrate it's 25th Anniversary this year, but is a vibrant part of Toronto's art community.

When we fast forward to 1999, and my return to electronic media, the sad reality was that I was twenty-five years older too, and had lost my position as an "early adopter". But I had become intrigued by the City of Vancouver's Millennium Project Portrait V2K, where you can find my story if you search for "Strider". I loved the concept that a website gave them the capacity to publish every story and photo that citizens would upload, and got my high-school son to help me to scan and upload my story and photo. I was lucky that I scored on my first try. My story became one of the featured ones, silkscreened on a huge banner in the project's year-long exhibition at the Vancouver Museum.

Positive experiences like that made me open to exploring new media when I returned to art school. But initially I felt a lot of shame as I sat in the computer lab, surrounded by students who seemed to have been working with computers since the day they were born. I was committing myself to spending a lot of time in a very steep learning curve, often feeling awkward and stupid. Conversations with people who were mid-life and older made me realize that I was not alone in feeling this way. So the exploration of this "shadow" is currently my central creative theme. For now, what interests me most is an examination of the impact on daily life that results from lack of skills, access -- or interest -- in electronic tools like computers, email, and cell phones. On a broader level, I hope that readers of this blog will also find positive suggestions for using the Internet itself to facilitate a zestier engagement in the face-to-face world.

Computer Shutdown Day Saturday May 3

The global Shutdown Day event takes place on Saturday, May 3 -- and ironically, given how much I have been promoting it, I will not only have my computer on, but it is the centerpiece of my grad project for the show that opens that night! However, I feel good that I was able to make two contributions: the two-minute video below entitled it "Shutdown Day - One Year Later" about my initial participation. It is embedded on their Shutdown Day website and has gotten over 6,000 views. The second contribution I think I made was an early email discussion with Denis, the Montreal computer programmer, who initiated this day to encourage balance around computer use. I pointed out that last year's event had been the same day as the flashmob pillow fight on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, and asked if that had been intentional. It hadn't been, but this year the central concept is for people to participate in local flash mobs rather than sit hunched over their computers. The grad exhibition goes for a week, and this blog will go on indefinitely. And all of you who are out taking part in Shutdown Day, check me out on another day!

My Interview with Waldo

I did a couple of all-nighters on making the above video "The Waldo Interview". I have been collaborating closely on the "Where on Earth is Waldo" project with Melanie Coles, and we wanted to get this video available as soon as possible to feed the global multi-media interest. Please follow the above link to her blog to learn about her project in her own words. In keeping with the theme of this blog, this reflects on my Waldo experience using the COABC (Came of Age Before Computers) point of view.

The first learning point for myself is that -- at the age of fifty-seven -- if I am going to be choosing to work for fifty hours solid, I need an ergonomic chair!

Also, what does it mean for me personally that, having chosen to commit to doing my art using a computer, I found that working on the Waldo project was the most fun I've had at Art School? I think that a big part of the reason that the Waldo project went viral on the Internet is that the aerial photo is of a real object -- it is not a photoshopped image on a map. I think there is a hunger for the "embodied", as I call it. The 54-foot painting of Waldo up on the roof is real, as are the fifteen art students who worked together to put him up there. As this blog evolves, I will be focusing more on Internet-related projects that re-connect people back into participating in the face-to-face world.

Another personal COABC reflection is that now there are some Internet places where I not only have stopped grinding my teeth, but actually enjoy myself. YouTube is one of these sites. From the user point of view, it is simple. Click a link recieved in an email or the "play" arrow in a website, and away the video goes. No matter how old and clunky your computer, and how basic your skills on the web, there are no compatibility issues, nor extra software you need. No wonder YouTube has leaped over the digital divide!

Finally, at the time I am writing this, two of my YouTube videos -- "The Waldo Interview" and "Shutdown Day, One Year Later" (see my March 24 article) -- have had over 2000 "hits". A third, "The Making of Waldo" (April 10) , has had over 1500 people fire it up. A "hit" means that somebody out there found an art piece that I made, and then took the time to watch it. As an artist, I am just as thrilled at a report of a hit as I would be looking at the guest book of people who had dropped into a gallery, or the tally of how many sat in a theatre to watch it. But I know that it is very unlikely that I would ever get that kind of attention, here on the ground, as a new grad -- or ever! A "hit" is the currency of the internet. An ephemeral connection. But I do feel like I'm getting paid. In a future posting I will look at the implications.

Snail mail in a post-fax world

Twenty years ago, I saw no future in faxes. Now I am in the place where I've come to believe that again. Throughout it all, snail mail has kept poking along. Does snail mail have a future? I hope so, not only for myself, but for my parents.

When faxes first came on the market in the mid-eighties and my boss asked me to buy a fax machine, I resisted. What would you ever use them for, when the mail only took three days? He told me to order one anyway. I was gratified when it sat gathering dust for weeks in the filing room. But then one day the green light on the clunky machine flickered, and out rolled a hot shiny piece of thermal paper with a customer's order on it. The rest is history.


Fast-forward to my recent decision not to buy a scanner that threw in a personal fax capability. This time the problem for me is that I no longer have a land-line telephone. Anyway, between emails and the scanner, when would I ever need to use a fax? If I ever found myself needing to send a fax because the destination required one, I could always do it from the post office.

For moments like that, I am really happy that the post office is there, and I am glad that I can contribute to the salary of that nice person who works there. It is the courier for people who don't have receptionists. And they haven't quite figured out how to squeeze Christmas packages through wires. I correspond with my siblings by email, and sometimes my sister will print them out in large font and take them over to my parents. There is a new American service Postful.com which converts emails into letters and mails them for you, for a price.


Currently, as I am about to graduate with a "high-tech" media degree, I am making my own "high-touch" thank-you cards for the people who have supported me. I visualize the pleasure of my friends and family when they find that tactile personal envelope in their mailboxes -- an occasion like a parcel used to be. Perhaps I could buy a package of envelopes and address and stamp them in advance to commit myself, then print out those family emails myself. My sister would appreciate it, it would support the postal service, and it would probably make my dad's day to have a real letter arrive through the "inbox" in the middle of his door.

Looking forward to your comments

Perspective

There are days in the lab at school when I deeply regret the decades it took me to get back to art school after my yoyo attitude led me to drop out back when I was still in my early twenties. But in the spirit of "looking on the bright side" I've always comforted myself that all those intervening years at least led to some wisdom, which could add depth to my point of view. However this morning at 4:00 a.m., as I was winding down from my video editing on the "Waldo Interview" piece, I had to confront that I might be losing my Wisdom edge as well.

For one thing, I seem to have slipped into a mode where I check the day's analytics on this blog in order to wind down. Hmmmm ... whatever happened to my longtime routine of using that time to work through the Public Library's "Maeve Binchey Readalike" list? For another thing, when I did fire up my "Dashboard" I felt the sort of reaction that, had I seen it in my son, would have led to a Mother/Son Talk about seeing the cup as being half-full rather than half-empty.



Scroll down to the picture of the dashboard I posted yesterday -- where my blog had achieved a summit of 90 hits on April 11. Well, okay. It was 89. Well this morning, when I peeked instead of going straight to bed, I saw to my horror that the midnight posting of the April 12 hits showed me sliding down the other side of my little mountain. Here is the "one day later" graph.

What would I say to my son? I would tell him that he could look at 45 hits -- well, actually 39 -- as being still more than twice my pre-Waldo-Echo peak of 15 on April 3. I'd also try to get a little sermonette about celebrity in before he put his headphones back on. Which I am about to do right now with my own headphones. Still hoping to get that little sucker up on YouTube before Melanie's CBC National Radio interview on "Q" tomorrow.

Part of the COABC demographic - by ladyofthelake

When I read your posts I often feel like you are talking about me. I have come late to the computer, digital camera, cell phone age and find it challenging but rewarding when I master a small skill. 

I loved the piece on your cell phone. I got my first ever cell phone about a month ago and am still very intimidated by it. My husband (he has never had one either) and I spent a whole evening going through the instruction book just learning the basics which I had pretty much forgotten by the morning.

Yes I am definitely a COABC and can totally  relate as to how difficult it must have been to go back to school with all  those new generation tech whizzes.

I became much more interested in improving my computer skills when my daughters went away to school and I wanted to communicate and share photos.

 I recently started a new job which requires quite a bit of computer use and I am very lucky to have a young lady I work with who willingly give me lots of help and advice. She is very patient!

I am very impressed at how you are getting out there helping, shall we say more mature people learn how to use digital cameras, computers etc. not to mention completing your degree at Emily Carr. You must be very proud of yourself as you should be.

I am looking forward to reading and learning more from your blog.

Riding a (good) viral event

The word "virus" in relation to computers started out as a bad thing. But now, with blogs, to have something you uploaded "go viral" is a huge thrill. I'm getting a small taste of that now, and it gives me insight into the world view of my son and fellow students. On the Sunday before the CBC TV interview which brought Melanie Coles' "Where On Earth Is Waldo" project to the attention of Brazil, and eventually the world, I put together the above video based on a slide show that I made as a an assignment for class. I uploaded it to YouTube when she got on TV the next day. In the one week that it has been up there, as of today 700 people have looked at it. That is a whole movie theatre worth of people. (And if you click on it now, it will be 701!) As a comparison in the year that I have been uploading videos there, I have had just over 800 views of all the other 12 videos.

So now I am right in the middle of being involved in a good story, and, because we live in a time-compressed world, now is the time tell it. Today I'm going into school to use the sound studio to do an interview with Waldo to upload to YouTube as fast as I can - hopefully before Monday (April 14) when Melanie has a national radio interview on "Q". See my postings below on April 10 and April 3 for more details and a link to her site. She has embedded a link to my blog, where, before the word got out, I had posted an article looking at her work in the context of other art. I subscribe to Google Analytics and I have been monitoring the echo effect of people coming over from Melanie's blog to check out mine.

She is using analytics to monitor her site too, and we both noticed that the sudden peaking flattened the prior lines on our graphs. Her blog was getting 1500 hits AN HOUR yesterday, whereas my peak was 90, the day that Brazil found Waldo. But for me it is a thrill. And I am beginning to understand how seductive it is to check how you are doing on the internet. So this has been a good COABC moment of insight.

Another COABC insight is the sense of urgency to put more material up there to meet the demand, out of a sense that we might be hitting Minute 7.5 of our Andy Warhol quota. I have looked around me in the lab during this end of term crunch, and know the solution to time compression is to find shortcuts. Here is where I trip over my ten thumbs, which feel very big right now! I had enough knowledge to be there doing the scanning, but not enough to know that a shortcut I took was going to have exactly the catastrophic effect I keep assuring COABC's is not likely to happen if they just take the risk and thrash around a bit. Long story short, I found myself without access to any of the source files I had so carefully collected during my role as Melanie's video documenter throughout the project. I knew I was vulnerable -- that my external drive was old, and was suddenly being carried around a lot. But I needed to be able to move all those files somewhere else. And the problem with backing up large amounts of data, is that you need a bigger container. I had already bought myself a larger external drive, but to do all the formatting and so on I needed to either take the time to figure it out, or organize myself to ask for help. So it was sitting on my table, stlll in the packaging, when the one it was supposed to replace took a dive. Murphy's law had kicked in, as it tends to do when you are busy and it feels like there is no time.

So that was the bad news. But the good news is that I DID know enough all along to be burning DVD's of the Waldo source files and giving them to Melanie. So I actually had that "backup" that computer repair guys always ironically ask you for. And for bonus points, it was "offsite". Though getting it back involved Melanie hiding the disks that night in a hole in a wall next to her place of work. Unlike Paris Hilton, we both had to interrupt our fame to go in to our part-time jobs. I had a cell phone moment like one sometimes overhears late at night on buses, as Melanie gave me directions to "it" and my side of the conversation must have sounded like a drug deal! Bottom line, today I have the files, tomorrow (please God) I upload a new video to YouTube to catch the wave of CBC listeners on Monday. Wish me luck!