I went grocery shopping for the first time in almost two weeks. I’m back in my house for the first time since 10am this morning, after getting about 5 hours sleep. I can’t see straight. I can’t think straight.

I left InterAccess at 1AM on Monday, deciding that debugging so late was a losing battle. Today I continued to lose that battle. These are the moments where I wonder why I didn’t take up photography.  I start unproductively pondering how to do this better next time, why I didn’t do this right the first time, and today while I was waiting for a glue gun to heat up I hopped into my email to find a colleague reminding me that for today, I pledged that I would write a blog about a woman working in technology whom I admire. This nice little note drew my head up from a pile of wires and had to remind me, in a broader context, why exactly I’ve decided to do this with my life.

To contextualize, around the blogospheres and interwebs right now, about one thousand people have (hopefully) followed through on this pledge that I took. As the homepage describes: “Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.”  It is meant to draw attention to the unnoticed, perhaps under appreciated women working the fields of technology (whether it take the form of art, medicine, etc). Ada Lovelace herself is respected as the first programmer, for writing, understanding and manipulating some of the first code for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Machine. This Machine is understood as a model for a computer, making her writings and descriptions of it, sort of like software. “Had the Analytical Engine ever actually been built,” according to Wikipedia ” Her program would have been able to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers.”

I’ll leave that hyper link in there because I didn’t know what those were until now…..or maybe I did and forgot. I did a lot of art and literature in high school and if I new hacking toys was going to be part of my career path maybe I would have tried harder in math….see I’m doing that unproductive thinking again…ok where was I….

This is my first blog for Ida Lovelace Day, and I still haven’t quite finished the blog I promised last week. I WILL blog about the Carey Young show at Power Plant, and I did not just take advantage of Helena Rickett letting me in, I will blog and see the show (Which everyone says is awesome). For now though, I must say I’m having difficulty blogging about a woman working in technology that I admire because, well, I’m blessed to know so many.

Nancy Paterson was incredibly encouraging while I was completing my undergrad. I didn’t think that I would be capable of showing so soon with the assistant dean of art from my alma mater. However now I digress, and I can name the lady whose fault this whole mess I’m in really is….

I met Jenn E Norton after I met her work. I went to the Grad Show at OCAD, the summer before my first year. I’m still terrible remembering artist’s names, but I saw this wonder work called Student in a Locker. This installation had a monitor in in a architypical red locker, and the person on the video inside pleads to be let out, offering bribes of cigarettes and anything else that could possibly hasten her release. Then, when the student motioned to knock against the locker, upon supposed contact the locker actually shook! So taken by this I wrote about it for a high assignment. Fast forward to September 2003 and I’m sitting in my first Time Based Media course with Doug Back, and decided to chat with the class assistant, mistaking her for a student. I asked her what work she had in the grad show, and she mentioned “this one piece with a video in a locker…” and she instantly became my hero.

From that moment on Jenn’s word was God and I would take all her instruction. She is a great teacher, and even after she stopped worked at OCAD she took time to show me things, draw a schematic, and even entertained those awful last weekend due date “it’s not working…” phone calls. She even listened to me when I was having the worst of bag days and I trusted her advice a lot. This did not happen too often, but I do recall a rather long day in second year, and she sent me an email saying “when I ran into you today you looked really down, what’s up?” She was able to offer some good advice, after picking through the emotional-vomit of a reply I sent her.

I feel a relationship of this nature matures the most when you finally understand or see the other person as a human being, equally capable of the emotions you have yourself. I’ve had this moment with Jenn and it was a really grounding experience (no pun intended). I won’t talk about it, but it did illuminate for me how your whole being becomes really involved in the art you do, the decisions you make and how you navigate through the world.

I ran into Jenn on the subway a few weeks ago, she’s been back in Toronto for a year or so. We both work at 401 Richmond, in different Video Art Organizations. She said “congratulations on your grant!” To which I replied: “Congratulations on your grant!” A rare and treasured moment that two people can say this to each other. She said she thought it was cute to see our names together on that same piece of paper after all these years. It resonated strongly with me as well.

Jenn, despite all you taught me and all you put up with, I’m still learning and finding my groove and finding my way through all this. I’m still making lots of mistakes and stay up way too late to finish work before shows, and drag people in to help. I’m trying to change.  As I think about Student in A Locker now with the hindsight of being a graduate myself, I also remember catching a high school student drop to her knees in front of  Crocodile Tears (Crying Cat) and then declare “This is the best thing, EVER!” With my job at vtape as well, I feel I have a glimpse of the satisfaction you must have from seeing young artists succeed.

Tomorrow I’m going to untangle some wires in an altered toy rabbit before it goes for it’s (slightly delayed) new skinning and installation. It’s a work in progress, needs testing and feedback, and while right now I’m exhausted and just dragging my feet about the whole prospect of another day, on this day marked for women working behind computer screens and logic-probes, I’m simply humbled and I realize how lucky I really am.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Art, Cultural Artifacts, Geekery, Global Events, Web News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.