Slow Media - the art of cinema in real time
The first glimmerings of what Slow Media might become began way back in May, 2000 at the Hollyhock Institute.
It was a beautiful spring morning on Cortes Island, British Columbia. There was mist coming off of the Pacific Ocean to my left, and the bright green of new growth was appearing in the organic garden to my right. It was there that my friend, Bill Weaver, introduced me to a new Panasonic high def camera. I remember him showing me footage of the surrounding coastal rain forest and I was amazed. It was my first exposure to high definition imagery and I recognized, almost immediately, that the clarity and resolution of the HD images had a power I simply hadn’t experienced before. Suddenly, the forest was a living, breathing, media entity, rather than a relatively muddy, low definition representation of the vivid life force we can see with our eyes. The increase from 480 to 1080 vertical lines of visual data was prompting an emotional reaction in me. This was cinema, untouched. This was our visual medium able to be used in a new way. This was the intersection of cinema, time, and art.
A few years later I got another opportunity to visit Cortes Island, this time in early June, and spend most of a week at the Hollyhock Institute. It’s a well know conference centre with an exceptional organic garden that’s been tended and nurtured on this site for the last forty years. Every morning, prior to convening in workshops, I spent as much time in the garden as I could communing with the incredible bloom of flowers and reveling in the very focused work of the bees. On one especially brilliant morning I recognized the bees had a specific penchant for the white poppies, so that’s here I focused my lens. With a quiet approach the bees ignored me and I was able to harvest some of the essence of this garden, a truly renewable resource.
Over the next decade, I would have countless conversations with both people and nature about what has become Slow Media. The resulting lessons from the land have instilled in me a desire to reclaim the power of the cinematic medium that so often gets lost, altered, and misused in the chaos of our modern world. So far, Slow Media has fostered friendships, sparked creativity, connected communities and acted as visual medicine to both filmmakers and viewers. The community is growing.
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