Update October 24, 2016: Part 2 of the Glenn Howarth exhibition is now on downtown at the Legacy Gallery. Running until January 7, 2017, this exhibition showcases a number of different works including some Telidon sequences not shown in Part 1.
Update August 9, 2016: The show has been getting some good press. There was a review in the August 7th edition of the Times Colonist, and this write up in Whitehot Magazine.
Over the past year and a half, one of my more interesting projects - and a pretty atypical one for me - has been in the area of digital art conservation, namely restoring a number of computer graphics works created by local artist Glenn Howarth back in the early 1980s.
Glenn Howarth passed away in 2009 and his digital media were donated to our University Archives in 2012. What made this project particularly challenging was that the technology he used, called Telidon, hasn't really been a thing since the late 1980s. So I had to hunt in some fairly obscure corners to locate the hardware and software needed to convert the files we pulled off of his old 5.25" floppy disks into viewable image sequences.
In addition to being early examples of a uniquely Canadian approach to digital art-making, these artworks have some local historic significance as well. Glenn Howarth used software developed right here at UVic to create his images (PCS, developed by a team led by Dr. Ernest Chang) and was sponsored for a time by former Writing chair Dr. David Godfrey.
Anyhow, I'm not going to go into too much detail right now although I do have plans to document the whole project at some point in the near future. I'm just posting to say the the project is finally done, and the fruits of this labour are viewable in the Legacy Maltwood Gallery on the lower level of the Main Library, as part of the exhibition The Averted Eye Sees: The Life and Work of Glenn Howarth, running until October 23rd. Excerpts from the artworks will also be viewable on the web at some point soon, but I don't know exactly when.
I'd also like to give a shout out to my collaborators, Daniel Hogg from UVic Fine Arts, and Brent Hilpert from the SPARC Museum in Coquitlam. This project literally could not have been done without their invaluable contributions.
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Glenn Howarth Telidon Installation, Legacy Maltwood Gallery[/caption]