Why I Became a Videomaker

I found this photograph among the batch of slides mentioned in the entry below; it too was taken some time in late 1979/early 1980. It is an appropriately grey but strangely evocative and almost exotic reminder of the Medway Towns of the late '70s/early '80s, and it bears a remarkable similarity to some work I am doing at the moment. It also played a small role in my becoming a videomaker. If I recall correctly this was part of a slide/sound piece I made with one of those devices that would dissolve between two carousel slide projectors controlled by an audio cassette tape. I made the piece using David Jackman's 'Slow Music' as a soundtrack. I made a large painting, not unlike the one in the last entry but more abstract, leaving a white rectangle in the bottom right hand corner onto which to project the slides. When I showed this to my tutor at the time Paul Richards, his response was that the slide/sound piece was good but I should lose the painting. Jackman's music was, as its title unambiguously suggests, indeed slow, and the dissolves between the images were very long. I later shot the slide/sound piece onto black and white video, shooting off the screen using a low contrast (as they all were then) video camera and a half inch tape Sony videorecorder in the Maidstone Art College video studio. That was my last ever painting and my first ever video.