[00:00 - 00:15]
Douglas Porter presents as a white man. The top of his head is bald, and he has grey hair around the sides. He has a grey moustache and wears a blue button down shirt.
The caption below him at the beginning of the video reads, “Electronic Media Artist & York University Professor Emeritus” .
Douglas Porter: My name is Doug Porter. I'm an artist. I was working for the Nova Scotia Government, Department of Communications. Along came this thing from the government where they said –
[00:16 - 00:23]
Two Telidon information pages are shown:
GENERAL INTEREST GUIDE
9.0 TELIDON EXPLANATION
Douglas Porter: "we have this thing called Telidon, and we want some volunteers who will be trained on it and then test it out and see how it works". So I said, "yeah, please, pick me." They let me stay after hours. So I thought, oh, well, I could make some art with this. This is new, this is different. It was given to me by the government. When I was first asked to be involved in this project, my response was I thought, wow, somebody's actually interested in this stuff that was going on 40 years ago. I thought, why? Because the graphics are so primitive and time consuming.
[01:01 - 01:07]
Telidon Image: A white rectangle. A red triangle juts out from the right. On the left, the letters e, s and t appear. The view moves back. The letters C R E S T are beside the red triangle.
[01:08 - 01:11]
Grainy live footage. Two hands hold a labelled black square, about 2 thirds the size of a standard piece of paper. A black square roughly a third of the original is held in front. It has a similar label. Both squares have a hole or circle in the middle.
Live, clear footage. Two hands hold 6 of the large squares in paper sleeves that reads “Maxwell Floppy Disk”. The disks are labelled with variations of, “Empty Objects by Doug Porter”.
Douglas Porter: It's not like watching paint dry, but it's like a different kind of engagement, right? I thought, this is great, but I was quite surprised. It fell into the broad category of telephone graphics. So it was first looked at from the government as a communications tool, but then away it goes, right?
[01:31 - 01:42]
Telidon Image: Three rows of five red question marks. The second from the left turns into a green dollar sign, the second from the right turns into a green dollar sign. A 2-dimensional graphic: a screen with a keypad panel beside it.
On-screen text: THEY ARE HERE NOW.
The word now repeats.
Telidon Image: Inside an indigo hue is the side view of a person sitting, hands poised. A beige computer monitor, keyboard and curly cord finish the image.
Douglas Porter: It's a marketing tool. There was this sense that this was the cutting edge for right then. This was a new technology and we didn't know where it was headed.
[01:48 - 01:59]
Telidon Image: A grey face with red lips and a black circular pendant is layered over the title: Empty Objects
Douglas Porter: So we wanted to jump in and then explore. The main word I would use to describe, Telidon on is interactive. Being able to get input from the user where they can make choices as to what they see.
Green Text: TO THE READER: WHEN YOU SEE A LITTLE YELLOW [box] WITH AN [chevron pointing right] PLEASE PRESS [right pointing chevron] ON YOUR KEYPAD. Thank you
A chart appears. Title: CHARTED ACCOUNT NO S144256-FR
Four vertical columns contain the headings: Subject, Nation, Balance, Politics
Row by row, the entries read:
MONDRIAN, DUTCH, 48790.8f, NO
MALEVICH, RUSSIA, 55.3658W, NO
MARINETTI, ITALY, 387HBD37, YES
RODCHENKO, RUSSIA, 63T5 HL21, YES
V DOESBURG, DUTCH , Y09.R3W12, NO
OUD, DUTCH, 5N3.B2K, NOLISSITZKY, RUSSIA, YYZ45B7, YES TATLIN, RUSSIA, 43RCX.84, YES
Text: DE STIJL is THE STYLE
[02:08 - 02:25]
Douglas Porter: You could develop a kind of voice and a relationship with the user. To me, there was a, a different, a level of playfulness that you could have. Gotta get your text in, gotta pull people through an idea, through a progression. It was designed to, to provide the text and visuals together. Artwork that I've done since then, uh, in video and then painting too, um, text and image together to play with each other or against each other, you know, create a tension.
Text: In his creations the abstract artist frees himself from individual sentiments and from particular impressions which he receives from outside, and that he breaks loose from the domination of individual inclinations within him.
Image: Lines delineating various sizes of rectangles cover over the text. The delinations shift. Occasionally a rectangle is filled in with one of the three colours (blue, red or yellow), and no more than two coloured rectangles appear at the same time.
Text: MONDRIAN WAS COMMITTED TO AN ART WHICH HE SAW LEADING MAN TOWARDS A SOCIAL UTOPIA DE STIJL WAS TO LIBERATE MAN FROM THE ARBITRARY AND ACCIDENTAL. ITS CONTENT WAS AN ELEMENTARY HARMONY WHICH WOULD EMBODY AN ESSENTIAL BALANCE, A REFLECTION OF THE UNIVERSAL HARMONY.
[02:44 - 03:06]
Douglas Porter: One thing I disliked about theTelidon was that it was the serial drawing that the image had to, by pixel, by pixel had to be put on the screen. But what you had to do was figure out how to work with it so that if you had constructed an image, you designed it such that it would maintain the user's interest while it was being built. You choreograph it so that there's like a continual reveal. I was trying to make sense of computers as an art medium and you know, computer culture, that kind of thing.
Caption: The photograph
Image: Above the caption, a grey line grows into a rectangle that fills the screen.
In the square light and dark grey blotches fill in the space. Black fills in the body of what eventually resembles a multi hued cow.
Below the cow the text changes to: Form intact - Relationships Accentuated
Shapes in blacks and greys fill in and cover the cow.
Below the black and grey shapes the text changes to: The Form Abolished
Additional squares and rectangles of different shapes and hues of grey continue to layer over each other.
The rectangles continue to shift in outlines and hues.
The title under the rectangles and squares reads: NOW DOES THIS LOOK LIKE A COW TO YOU? A chevron with a red background appears at the end of the sentence.
Video description by Kat Germain. Modified by Shauna Jean Doherty.
