DPI:

What were you doing before that and how did you get lead into using media or live performances?

Hal Eagar [1]:

I seem to have always fallen into the theatre tech even in elementary and middle school, it's a bit freaky because it's not like there was any opportunity to do it, I just somehow did. But anyway by the time I was in High school there was opportunity, and I did a lot of design and crew work. So when I went to school at Purchase [2]being a stage hand was what I was doing to pay my way through school. (though not in their theatre design-tech program). Video and Computers were always pretty easy for me, I worked for a AV rental house doing conventions in Hawaii where I went to High School, doing low and high end video for corporate meetings. And I also worked for the Community College on Maui [3] for a while, in their pretty decent video studio doing satellite video teleconferencing classes.

Somehow I got into a Multi-Media class in the Art School at Purchase my first year because there was no other video going on, it was all really early hacks with Video Disk players, and cutting edge "sound cards" on 286 and 386 computers that were all "tricked out". There was one system in the room, that had 3D Studio and Autodesk Animator which I loved, and all the interactivity was done in Authorware which I was just good at. Anyway the video was barely working, but I think I was good at "multi-media" because of my theatre background, and making a CD-ROM type thing was about working with a design team, not doing it all in your studio on your own like the real Art School students were being taught to do. At any rate it kept my interest so I helped TA the class for the next four years as all the computers and software got better. And I was using gopher and lynx on the school terminals, but when Mosaic came along and I got a look at that, I was right on that, like "WOW, this is both neat and still kind of sucks, but with so much potential" it's going to be like the Multi-Media stuff, (which it took it's time getting to, but it sure did get there)

Anyway I decided right there in my little epiphany moment that I wanted to explore this new medium with a theatre piece, and that's how I ended up doing a show in the planetarium full of computers and video projectors.

Actually I thought it sucked, but everyone was impressed. I guess they saw what this might be in a few years the same way I saw the web. So I just sort of started trying to head off in the direction of New Media theatre, and it sort of worked out.