An overhead projector in every port: Daniel Barrow interview
Last year, I had my mind blown by Winnipeg Babysitter. A collection of clips from a kind of Wild West of public access cable TV, the anthology brought back memories of a misspent and pimply youth with clips from “Survival” (a mockapolyptic talk show with director Guy My Winnipeg Maddin, among others) as well as some shows I’d never seen—classics of DIY programming like “Math with Marty” and “Metal Inquisition” (featuring Fearless Pig and Terrible Dog). Some of the participants, like the two high school students putting on a surprisingly funny comedy show, were fully aware of what they were doing, while others were, uhm, not—though every one of the amateur TV artists had a story to tell, as curator Daniel Barrow demonstrated via informative overhead projections augmenting the clips. Barrow, who curated the show, uses overhead projections in his other work as well: The Face of Everything, inspired by the story of Liberace’s lover Scott Thorson, and his new show, Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry. Barrow, who has shown his “manual animation” far and wide, was packing for a trip out west when guttersnipe reached him at home.
DB: I’m pretty much packed. No, no overhead projector. I’ve done this long enough that I have overhead projectors in just about every Canadian city.
SC: Is there a Cadillac of overhead projectors, like a model of German engineering or something?
DB: I think there is. I have my favourite. It’s a Bell and Howell 3016. The light is different, it puts a gold cast on the image. And the focus is also different, and it has a wicked throw. I can work with it in any space. But it doesn’t have a spare bulb, and I usually opt for something that does.
SC: Is there a community of overhead projector types? I think someone did something similar when I saw [indie-rock band] Final Fantasy.
DB: There are now. I wasn’t aware when I first started. But now there are quite a few people, especially out of Toronto*, who use overhead projectors now.
SC: I saw a Final Fantasy show where someone was using an overhead projector.
DB: Yeah. I used to perform with Hidden Cameras, and Owen [Pallet] left the band and got someone else to do it when he formed Final Fantasy.
SC: Were you the go-to student in high school when it came to overhead projectors?
DB: No, but that’s where I started using them. I was pretty inspired by an art history professor who used an overhead projector. She was like an ex-nun who’d been working at the school probably for probably close to 50 years, and she’d been using the same lectures, so they were very structured, and almost theatrical because the script was totally locked and had been for decades. And she would always use two spy projections, and do a compare and contrast. She would do this kind of theatrical presentation, then turn off the slide projectors and walk over to the overhead projector, and everything she’d just said had been condensed into point-form notation. She wanted everyone to have the same notes. And then she would read her notes while she hand-cranked this whole ream of text. And she had a very beautiful, lilting voice, and there was something very evocative about this combination of her voice and scrolling imagery. I started parodying her in my studio classes. It was a big hit so I kept doing it, and gradually it became more pictorial and more narrative.
SC: How did Winnipeg Babysitter come about?
DB: What happened is, there used to be two cable companies in Winnipeg: Winnipeg Cablevision on the east side of the river and Videon on the west side. Videon purchased Winnipeg Cablevision, and set up this archive of public acces television from Winnipeg in their studios. Eventually Shaw purchased Videon, and they came in and did a lot of restructuring. They had no attachment to this history, and they just trashed the entire archive**. So it was gone; at the time, when I’d heard this, I was a distribution coordinator at Video Pool. I was in charge of the archive and we’d just built this climate and humidity controlled vault for videotape, so it occurred to me then that someone should start recompiling that history. But I didn’t do anything about it immediately. I only really started ambitiously compiling that archive three years later, in 2004.
SC: So where did you find the clips?
DB: Almost everyone had VHS copies they’d taped for themselves off television.
SC: How much was lost?
DB: Oh, who knows. Winnipeg Babysitter really is an archive that starts around 1983, 1984, which represents the advent of the consumer-grade VCR. Because that’s when started people started taping off TV. Everything before that is lost.
SC: So is there more where that came from?
DB: Yeah, when I presented it in Winnipeg it was two programs. It was about four hours, and I have way more than that. I watched hours and hours of TV to compile the 90-minutes that you saw. We got a grant to create the Winnipeg Babysitter DVD, so I’m putting that together. I’m just working on the bonus extras section now.
SC: So is Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry a more autobiographical for you?
DB: If you’re looking for it you’ll see parallels between Winnipeg Babysitter and Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry, because it’s about this garbage man who is compiling an independently produced phone book. He’s sifting through everyone’s garbage to include personal information to include in this book, he’s peering through the windows of their homes. I was working on the two projects simultaneously so there are parallels.
SC: It seems like the theme might be someone’s life being consumed by an art project.
DB: Or failed artists trying to kickstart their own creative process with their own quasi-art project. That’s the case with Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry. It’s about a garbage man who has art-school training but never imagined any other destiny for himself. But he’s decided to use the circumstances to create this piece of artwork that will benefit his community. But what he doesn’t realize is, he’s being followed by this serial killer, who’s murdering everyone he includes in his phone book. Thereby rendering it obsolete.
Daniel Barrow presents Everytime I See Your Picture I Cry to Performance Works as part of the PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts in Vancouver Feb. 6. Gina Tessaro’s review will run here a couple of days later.
*Of course.
**Fuck you Shaw, you fucking asswipes.
