5: Never stop learning

I used to think that one day I’ll know enough about something or other that I will just know everything. Then analogue was replaced by digital. Film became ones and zeros. All I knew from a technical point of view was worthless.

I remember the day at art school when they opened the ‘computer lab’. Eight shiny new Apple Macintosh 512K computers. You know how people say that the first digital watches had more computing power than the Apollo moon missions? Well, these Macs had less.

I could store three programs and a semester worth of essays, assignments and digital ‘artwork’ on one 1.44MB 3 ½ inch floppy disk. Which could mean my essays, assignments and digital ‘artwork’ were very small.

This was the first time I had been up close and personal with a computer. To use these Macs I had to get, I shit you not, a licence from the University of New South Wales, College of Fine Art, Media Department. Acquiring the licence involved working through a workbook and then performing a set of tasks with a member of the media department overseeing me. FFS! So with my freshly minted MacLicence in hand I was unleashed into the world of fucking nothing. It was 1987. There was no internet. Telstra was still called Telecom and owned by the Government. Networking was barely a thing.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the dungeon I mean photography department, we were still risking various kinds of cancer using same pretty nasty chemicals with what was basically 18th Century technology. I have the chemical burns on my knuckles as proof

But I knew it all and became the go to guy for technical stuff. Then Canon released the EOS-1 and fuck those fucking fuckers. It was what I imagined the industrial revolution must have been like but a hundred times faster. One day we’re all farmers making enough for our own families, the next we’ve got 1000 acres of cotton, selling to the highest bidder at a market in another country.

When my father ran the Film & Tape Library at the ABC in Gore Hill, the card catalogue system took up an entire office. You know where this going. I think the whole thing is now on a 1.44MB 3 ½ inch floppy disk. And the library itself has been digitised and resides in the ‘Cloud’.

And none of this is bad and I’m not a Luddite but the idea of ‘knowing’ everything about anything is clearly impossible. Of the four forces in the universe (magnetism, gravity, weak nuclear bonds and strong nuclear bonds) the pointy heads don’t know how those things work – and one of them keeps us from floating into space!

Learning goes way beyond certificates and degrees and masters which sit on my wall to prop up my ego. How to fix stuff has become really important to me. How to build stuff (not Ikea – I’ve mastered that by building what is considered to be their most complicated piece, the Brimmnes Day Bed) has become super important. Building stuff digitally like my next project TheXpert.Network and all the associated intricacies.

I think most importantly for me it keeps me young and my brain from turning to mush.