[00:00 - 00:02]
The image is black with intermittent bursts of electrical noise or static.
[00:03 - 00:15]
John Durno, a white man with glasses, is sitting in front of numerous vintage computers, which are positioned on a desk. He looks directly at the camera and is sharing information about his experience with Telidon.
Green text appears at the bottom of the screen in capital letters: JOHN DURNO. More green text appears below: HEAD, LIBRARY SYSTEMS, UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA. The text is wiped away.
John Durno: My name is John Durno. I'm the head of Library Systems at the University of Victoria Libraries where I oversee our computing deployments and infrastructure. I also have a strong research interest in digital archeology with a specific focus on Telidon.
[00:16 - 00:24]
The video cuts to a series of Telidon images. The first image we see is a green grid with the word TELIDON in a curvy font. The word is repeated up the centre of the screen in a rainbow of colours, blue, violet, red, and green.
John Durno continues to be heard from off screen: I do see myself as being, somewhat outside the mainstream of both libraries and archives in doing this kind of work.
[00:25 - 00:30]
A black screen with the words TELIDON and NAPLPS appear in metallic block letters on screen. Green text appears underneath that reads NORTH AMERICAN PRESENTATION LEVEL PROTOCOL SYNTAX.
John Durno: I first got involved with Telidon in January 2015, when I was asked to take a look at some Telidon materials that had arrived in our archives.
[00:31 - 00:34]
Green ASCII symbols fill the screen.
[00:35 - 00:36]
The video cuts back to the original image of John Durno, sitting.
John Durno: It was in preparation for an exhibition of an artist named Glenn Howarth
[00:37 - 00:40]
A black screen appears that reads: SELECTED WORKS GLENN HOWARTH 1984.
Below this text reads PRESS 1 TO BEGIN.
John Durno: who was a local Victoria artist, mostly a painter and drawer, but who,
[00:41 - 00:51]
A Telidon artwork by Glenn Howarth appears, featuring a white car with its trunk open positioned on the right side of the image.
John Durno: had done a significant amount of Telidon work back in the early 1980s.
[00:52 - 01:03]
A new artwork by Glenn Howarth appears featuring the back of a red car that has a puddle underneath it. A small bird is in the puddle.
John Durno: When I first encountered Glenn Howarth's artwork, I was quite fascinated. I'd never heard of Telidon art before. Despite the fact that I had been a library technologist for almost 20 years, at that point, had fallen so deeply into obscurity that it was, uh,
[01:04 - 01:20]
Another work by Glenn Howarth appears featuring a woman with blonde hair looking out a window onto a forest.
John Durno: a revelation to discover. There had been an entire school of digital art that had existed in the early eighties that was specifically Canadian. I remember sort of reading histories of Canadian digital art that don't even mention Telidon, and yet,
[01:21 - 01:24]
The camera returns to John Durno sitting and talking to the camera.
John Durno: this is some of the first networked art that ever appeared in Canada, right? It's certainly the most sophisticated for its era.
[01:25 - 01:29]
The camera cuts to a wider shot of the room John Durno is in. It is a computer lab. He walks towards the back wall.
[01:30 - 01:34]
A vintage computer monitor displays a Telidon artwork. John Durno sits beside the monitor on a laptop, controlling the image.
John Durno: One of the great things about working with Telidon is that it presents a variety of...
[01:35 - 01:38]
The video returns to the first image of John Durno.
John Durno: really, really interesting challenges in the recovery and restoration of digital materials.
[01:39 - 02:00]
An image of a tube television screen appears. This section of video oscillates between a grainy image of a series of lines flickering across the screen and an image of a person holding up a Telidon controller. The controller is made of a heavy black plastic, fits in the palm of a hand, has several black buttons, and the word TELIDON at the top.
John Durno: This is a relatively new area in library and archival science. We're really just getting into the whole aspect of, how do we make digital objects accessible for the long term. And Telidon is an almost perfect, test case for this kind of work.
[02:01 - 02:05]
A Telidon image appears. It is a piece of sheet music by Johannes Brahms. The musical staff is in blue and the notes are in white. A new Telidon image appears. It is a home screen with the word TELIDON on the top and the titles of various pages that users can select below.
John Durno: One of the major challenges I found with working with Telidon art is the scarcity of the equipment that was available to work with.
[02:06 - 02:16]
An image of Telidon artist Pierre Roverre sitting at a desk with a Telidon creation terminal appears. The creation terminal consists of two monitors, a drawing tablet, and a keyboard.
John Durno: There weren't a lot of Telidon terminals made back in the early eighties, and very, very few of them have survived into a working condition in the, year 2022.
[02:17 - 02:27]
The video returns to John Durno.
John Durno: The word I would use to describe Telidon is ingenious. It was developed by remarkably clever people who were able to do very, very sophisticated things with graphics and coding in
[02:28 - 02:29]
An animation of a 1980s ear computer appears. The computer rises towards the top of the screen revealing its inner workings, which the camera zooms in on.
John Durno: an era when the technological limitations were extreme.
[02:30 - 02:48]
The video returns to John Durno.
John Durno: I first got involved with InterAccess back in 2018 when I was asked to give a talk, Digital Archeology Excavating Telidon, uh, during a 35th anniversary celebration of Telidon that was happening at the art centre.
[02:49 - 02:58]
The video returns to the scene with a vintage computer monitor displaying a Telidon artwork. John Durno sits beside the monitor on a laptop, controlling the image.
John Durno: So that was where I first met my future collaborators on the Telidon art exhibition project and
[02:59 - 3:02]
The camera returns to a shot of John Durno, sitting and wrapping up the interview.
John Durno: Telidon art restoration project to this day.
[03:03 - 03:05]
The image is black with intermittent bursts of electrical noise or static.
[Video description by Shauna Jean Doherty.]
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