Remembering Dana
(Less than two months ago, in December 2000, we lost a multimedia pioneer on this popsicle stand we call Earth. Dana Atchley, founder of the Digital Storytelling Festival and Center for Digital Storytelling, Apple Master, and artist of many mediums, passed away. As he was for many others drawn to interactive technology and the evolution of narrative forms, Dana was an inspiration to me. In the spirit of the irreducible value of a good story, here's a look back at my encounters with Dana Winslow Atchley III.)
I first met Dana Atchley back in 1990, while working at the Apple Multimedia Lab in San Francisco, California. Fabrice Florin had hired Dana to document through video some of the projects that were then underway at the Lab. I had already met the Brothers Arnowitz (Burt and Dave, who were also contracted to videotape projects at the Lab), and Dana was helping interview people who worked there. At the same time, I was working on a personal video project for my family that spun out of a tri-annual family reunion I had been documenting through photographs, videotape, and audio interviews.
In late 1991, after leaving Apple, I was sharing a house with Nick West (another Lab alum), on Lower Nob Hill - or "Tenderloin Heights" - as we affectionately referred to it. Nick had been helping Dana with Lingo (the scripting language of Macromedia Director) for a prototype version of Next Exit. Nick suggested I ask Dana about possibly using his editing equipment. After a phone call to him describing my project, he offered the use of his off-line editing equipment to me, right on the spot, gratis. Over time, he was so generous as to loan me a key to his studio on Cesar Chavez (Army) St., so I could come by in the evenings after working down in Foster City to let myself in, work on my project for a few hours, and then let myself out.
And what a world that studio was! An accretion of decades of his own work in video, photos, mail art, prints, Americana, kitsch, homespun mementos of stops on the highways of his migratory imperative. Sometimes we'd work side by side: he on the early structure of Next Exit; myself with Super 90 edit controller and the 3/4" editing machines, building a structure of my family video project (remember, this was a long time before cheap digital video editing software like iMovie, and hard drive space was still pretty expensive, so very few people were editing with either Avid or Adobe Premiere then).
He'd tell me stories about his place in Crested Butte, and how much he missed not being there sometimes. Dana had great taste in music, really diverse. He'd groove to Charlie Parker or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or sing along with Jimmie Dale Gilmore as he warbled in his inimitable vibrato "Tonight, I Think I'm Gonna Go Downtown" or "My Mind's Got A Mind Of Its Own." Dana had his own kind of cool: worldly, funky, folksy, open, smart and funny. He was a laid-back workaholic who could be that way because he'd made what he loved to do -into- his work. In him, I could see that you could grow up following your own path, fold in the wealth of experience and education, make a living, and still keep the kid inside alive.
In the spring of '92, I started wrapping up my project and I told Dana that I was going to go help start a magazine about technology and culture. He was curious as to what it was all about, and I explained that I'd met these American expats from Amsterdam who had recently moved to San Francisco to start this magazine called "Wired." (I didn't see Dana much after that, but whenever I did, he'd greet me with a big smile and a handshake and we'd share a few words about the growth of both the Storytelling Festival and of Wired.)
Around this time, Joe's Digital Diner started happening at Dana's studio, and fellow Apple refugee Abbe Don gave her presentation of "We Make Memories" at the Diner, tapping into her family tradition of storytelling from the Yiddish/Jewish diaspora perspective. The tools of our time, of digital technologies - awkward devices, programming languages, interfaces and display mechanisms - - could not stop Dana's quest to bring his storytelling skills to this new medium. He created a narrative of the open road, of a life lived as art, of the bonds of family and extended family, filled with warmth and humanism. The kind of stuff that these new technologies didn't necessarily lend themselves to, at least not in their early days, and still today (when it's telling that one of the most popular multimedia software programs is called "Flash" - not "Substance").
I talked to Nick West on the phone today, and he said that he thought of Dana as one of his few "mentors" in multimedia/new media. I have to agree. If nothing else, Dana was (and is) an inspiration to a lot of people who met him - through his Digital Storytelling Festival workshops, or before. He resolutely believed that you could still tell compelling tales in this new medium, buggy software be damned (!) - he was going to make it do what -he- wanted...bend it to his will and his creative desire to share personal experiences in a new way.
His website stands as an inspiration, too. Spend some time there, and you see the patterns of an artist's omnivorously hungry mind, growing over the decades. The terms "eclectic" and "Renaissance Man/Woman" are often blurted out (sometimes prematurely) to describe people who express their creativity in multiple mediums, but I think Dana really earned the right to be described not only by these words, but as someone who bridged the gap between Old School and New School - taking the ancient art of storytelling into places where it had never been before, with that true pioneer gift of making it up as he went along. While his website is an elegant form of chronological self-historification, it's also much more than that. In time, I think his work will be studied in the highest canon of performance artists and media artists who either worked with contemporary tools or invented their own (or both) to take storytelling forward.
Dana, I'll always remember your electric campfire. Ace Space - thank you for a life that continues to inspire me.
