Intern Researcher
VIVO Media Arts Centre, Vancouver BC Sep-Dec 2017
As the end of the term is approaching, today was the last day of my work at the library. I had a meeting with Karen to share my experiences of working in VIVO. It has been really great time working there, and the project that I have done with those amazing artists was something more than I expected to engage with out of this learning experience. Karen gave me a positive feedback, saying how this kind of research project is important for the organization because it usually takes a lot of time to do that and certainly is not easy to get done. We also discussed ‘now what’ part; now I have the recordings of the interviews with six different artists, so what do I want to do with them? Karen suggested that my project could be up on a page under the research project on VIVO’s website. I thought that was a good idea to put my project up in the online archive so that the ideas and voices of the artists in my semi-personal research project could reach to wider audiences. I also thought that I needed to think more through how and what I want to present the project, so I told that to Karen and we decided to have another meeting for that (and also to wrap up everything) sometime in December.
After the meeting, I was editing the recordings of the interviews of Brady and Crista. Listening to the artists talking with my headphones feels very intimate, and I feel like this phase of editing after the actual conversations with the artists is another layer of learning because I understand the ideas discussed in deeper level by chewing word by word that came out of the artists. Then I started taking notes of the words that resonated me or stood out in some ways, like things that I thought maybe it was important for understanding the development of the media art.
When Karen asked me what I was going to do for the creative response, I didn’t have a concrete image of it, but I knew I wanted to use the materials I have -that is the voices of the artists from the interview. I also wanted to make something speaks directly to the library and archive and the importance of the prints in there, so I asked Karen if there was extra archive box that I could use for the response, and she generously spared me a box and a plastic bag to cover that to protect it from rain on my way home! I’m still thinking, but basically, my idea so far is that stuffing the archival box with the artists’ words.
Now that I got great materials to remix and make something with, I’m ready to get my hands on and actually start making!
Photo: stacks of archival boxes
I have been traveling around Vancouver in order to visit the artists and do the interviews, so today was the first day of on-site work in a while. It was nice to see people in VIVO again, I found out a few changes though; for instance, Audrey, whom I worked with at the archive and library, has left VIVO recently after finishing her project. I usually sit in the corner of the office area and work on my laptop, however, today I stayed in the archive area where Audrey used to work. I had some recordings to edit, the artist research for my next interview with Crista Dahl, and I was also expecting ‘a meeting’ (this was rather a casual conversation) with Karen regarding my project’s next step -creating an audio archive which is really exciting!
It was easier for me to talk to Karen because her workspace is around the archive shelves in the library and I was sitting right behind the shelf and then her desk. When I came in, Karen was busy making phone calls. She told me that the person she was going to talk with was very chatty and she had another phone call after that so had to get done everything in time. She seemed a bit stressed while she was waiting for a call (I relate that to myself when I had to call artists that I never met in person to explain my project and set up a meeting time). Before I start editing audios, even hearing how Karen speaks and communicates on the phone was very interesting to me and I learned a lot by that. So, I think that physically being close, working in the same space, is important! This little lesson also reminded me Pascal Gielen’s article on immaterial labour and his discussion around communication at a workplace. Being able to have a chat/informal conversation with my supervisor may have little to do with my productivity, but this is an essential skill to develop trusts between us that might allow me to speak up those undeveloped ideas, in my opinion. I don’t actually know what exactly Karen is working on (I only know that she has lots of projects going on), but from what I observed during my hours, her work is much in the form of communication (emails, phone calls, talking with other VIVO people).
I shared five audio files of the interviews with Karen. In order to support the material (the interview recordings), I was told to provide my short bio and information of the project (location, date, and the project description). I worked on the writing and that made me think through what I have been doing for the past weeks, reflecting my initial goals for the project and what it looks like to me after the interviews. Writing and summarizing also helped me to think about the project as a whole -while I didn’t have any fixed or standard questions, and I interviewed different generations of artists and they gave it different perspectives, I think that that gave it an interesting insight to Media art – its development and the divergence. As I mentioned, I haven’t done the interview with Crista yet, so it’s missing the last piece, but I’m surprised at looking at how each interview made the project somehow coherent under the theme of video art. After I’ve done the writing and added to the file, I did more research on the last interview subject, Crista Dahl. I have been researching on her since October, however, because she has a long career and many stories, especially about the Video Inn, it was hard to choose what to ask. I was reading the book that Karen gave it to me, where Crista was interviewed about the development and history of VIVO, and that was very helpful for me to understand about Crista as well as the foundation of the artist-run-centre. I spoke to Crista over the phone last week to set up a time for an interview, and she suggested me to take a look at the Video Guide magazine, which was published in 1978-1992 by the Satellite Video Exchange Society. I went through VIVO’s online archive of the Video Guide. Then I started listing up interview questions to her, mostly focusing on what ideas were discussed at that time, and what the motivation was and the people’s lifestyles looked like at the start when there was very limited amount of money for the labors.
photo of my workspace in the archive library
Recently, I continue working on the project-Making of an Archive, my curator Shaun assigned more important tasks to figure out. Few days ago, we ended the artist’s talk that gave a presentation related to her ideas of collecting and documenting photos of immigrants’ everyday life. At this moment, I went to the archive besides our gallery where some photo documentations have already been installed. Those photos represent the history of Canadian immigrants from last century to the contemporary context, in order to narrow down the topic of a research that Shaun assigns to me, I focused on several keywords and searched all through their database. There are eight words in total: celebration, parade, protest, wedding, religion, rally, temple and cannery. For each word typed on a website of the Richmond archive, there are some digital images relating to its content.
At the beginning, it is easier to find many photos attached to my keyword, and I have payed attention to similarities among those people’s life. For example, “cannery” included landscapes at the waterfront of Steveston, and interiors of canneries with their workers doing different jobs. Although they have gotten distinctive positions on the process of producing canned fish, it was hectic for workers to finish simple works as obvious appearances of exhausted, little bit annoying faces on them. The similarity we could find is their unwillingnesses devoting to the work whenever it is filled with troubles, such as strong smells that we could imagine in that scene. According to personal feeling, workers who were from overseas countries may be experiencing the inevitable bouts of homesickness due to the “cultural shock” or “cultural gap”in the multiple social context. It bring up a stubborn problem of social and cultural communication, even though more citizens joins into Canadian public communities andinstitutions, they could not real understand the conventional way in which native speakers are talking to each other. Some more professional translators have done countless works of diverse languages, yet they could not figure out this basic question: how do you translate words without interrupting the original meanings? As I do all the time, the transformation is taking place when you make use of your brain to decode distinctive passwords between two languages. 
Technically, grammars and spellings for each language are unique to be created and learned, but cultural meanings and symbols behind those are hardly accessible, metaphors of one single word or some slangs being a standard part of English have confused learners as well as their translators, the way to make balance between original contents and new one is literally ambiguous. The use of graceful sentences to make up untranslatable meanings of implications is usually to be expected.
In conclusion, those workers showed on photos of archives are culturally and socially different from the western areas, in specifically, the Canadian context. Especially for the language they speak is constructed distinctively in comparison with English. As a result, workers who were migrating to Canada from 19th century to early 20th century want to support their family by taking high incomes. However, they were shocked by the cultural differences originally produced by languages, communities and so on. I believed that making photo archives would be an imperative step to let people focus on the history as well as situations of foreign workers.
After checking and collecting photos documents in Richmond archives, we sent our requirements of possible resources of six photos: what are they from? which person donated photos and whether they are still alive or not? Importantly, we also want to clarify if there are additional sorties behind those photos. Unfortunately, archives are lacking more details on sources of photos and unable to review the date of submissions as time goes by quickly. But we have been informed to consult a biography of one artist called York Wong, who may created and owned more relevant information of immigrants. It could be regarded as a new stage for my research work, due to the limitation of time and space, I will continue my research with my partner Fiona on next Tuesday, at the same time, do some preparations of a night event.
For more information about the next week event, I will post on another blog.
My project through VIVO, interviewing media artists in Vancouver, has got even more exciting when it finally comes to meet with the artists after somewhat stressful processes of writing emails, waiting for the replies, and getting confirmation to schedule 6 interviews within my limited time for the partnership as well as their limited time (the artists I’m working with often travel internationally, so I am very lucky to have this opportunity!) I managed to set up a time for all the interviews by the end of October, and I have done three interviews so far.
Today’s blog is a reflection of an interview with Paul Wong. I went to visit Paul at his primary studio on Main street. His studio has a wide window through which you can see what’s going on the street on one side and on the other side is an archive of televisions, recorders, monitors, and cameras that work just fine according to the artist. Being in his studio is like being in the different world, another time and space, perhaps because of the aura of objects in the room and Paul himself. I was able to begin the interview in a relaxed atmosphere. I asked him about how he started making art in the medium of video and the development of the satellite video exchange society as a founding member. He said he was experimenting portapack that was available to him at that time. The way he described how the portable television at that time was radical and shift what one makes, distributes and receives sounds applicable to our situation today – how smartphones and the internet shift the form of our communication and dissemination of information. What has struck me is, by making works by and for audiences outside mainstream televisions, what the artist and his colleagues were doing was radical because they were challenging traditions, conventions, stereotypes, big money, and the very forms of art and trying to create something beyond and outside that. He emphasized how it was very exciting and interesting to experiment, make and show something new to the world. Then Paul talked about the development of the artist society, VIVO. When he said that the artist collective had a serious discussion on the new medium on every Wednesday at 6 pm at the dinner table and they treated everyone equally, I thought the fundamental philosophy of artist-run centre was there, and hearing the experience of how they made it happen from Paul was 10 times convincing than reading its history. We also talked what he thinks about the image-saturated reality of today’s world around us in relation to one of his work called “Flash memory.” It is interesting and inspiring that he thinks we are in the first generation of digital technology and the technology is still being “clumsy”, which he means it’s not developed enough (it still has Wi-Fi problems, glitches etc. to be more sophisticated.) Then we talked about Instagram and creativity, how sharing creative and cool stuff with people influences each other. I like his approach because it is based on his everyday lives and subjectivity to speak something beyond that. What I learned from the conversation with Paul is that by “talking and doing/making” we are learning and trying to understand what it is just like he was experimenting with portapack and talking with the people back then.
It was a really fun interview and gave me insight into the development of media art that is one of my goals throughout the project. As an interviewer, I guess my strategy to refine interview questions to the very simple ones after artist research and list up them so that the interview can be less structured and more flexible worked well this time. One thing I’ll have to rethink is that to what extent I should address specific works of the artist because now I feel like I should have asked Paul more about his artworks in detail. Fortunately, I have a chance to try that out for the next interview with Matilda Aslizadeh this week, so I’ll see how it goes!
photo: the media archive in Paul’s studio
Paul Wong, (born November 20, 1954, in Prince Rupert, British Columbia) is a Canadian multimedia artist. An award-winning artist, curator, and organizer of public interventions since the mid-1970s, Wong is known for his engagement with issues of race, sex, and death. His work varies from conceptual performances to narratives, meshing video, photography, installation, and performance with Chinese-Canadian cultural perspectives.
website: http://paulwongprojects.com/
VIVO Media Arts Centre (Video In Studios/ Video Out Distribution), governed by the Satellite Video Exchange Society (SVES), is Vancouver’s first media arts access centre, and one of the oldest artist-run centres in Western Canada. The society was incorporated in 1973, following the Matrix International Video Exchange Conference and Festival.
Today, the thriving artist-run centre operates a multi-purpose facility immersed in the production, exhibition, education, distribution and archives, providing a supportive environment for artists to experiment and rich resources to Vancouver art community.
VIVO’s mission is to directly support artists and independent community-based producers to develop, exchange, and disseminate their skills in a supportive environment through accessible services and programs.
VIVO’s vision is a robust, diverse, and vibrant media arts sector: a catalyst for critical and innovative engagement with the material forms and cultural meanings of media and technology.
VIVO’s mandate is to offer a broad range of services and opportunities to artists and the public, including affordable rental of equipment and facilities, public programmings such as events, exhibitions, residencies and more, international distribution and work exchange, and Western Canada’s largest public reference library and archive of media art.
VIVO accepts submissions on an ongoing basis. Submissions are reviewed by the Events+Exhibitions curator with input from the Events and Exhibitions Committee, looking for projects that critically engage with their medium and the context in which they are produced.
VIVO’s supporting partners are the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia, the City of Vancouver, Human Resources Development Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, Metro Vancouver, and individual donors. t is also supported by the labour and effort of individual artists, activists and cultural workers.