SCREEN TIME: GLASS CINEMA EMERGES ONLINE by David Schnuckel One irony that I’m curious to hear more about one day is how the world’s shared experience of a pandemic culminated in billions of different and trying circumstances within it. Stories told by the billions of voices who have been navigating a world turned upside down in their own way. Narratives not only of constriction and crisis, but also of triumph and transformation. Whether faring new obstacles personally, professionally, or creatively, the idea of a specific matter of shared adversity to overcome that we can all speak to during the pandemic is hard to imagine. But as we were locked down in 2020 – and have somewhat partially emerged into a foggy version of what normal used to be like here in 2021 – we’ve all made significant modifications to our day-to-day in order to still stay connected to each other (and our livelihoods) while obligated to keep our distance. But there is one thing we might have in common as we make our way to what appears to be some kind of light at the end of this COVID tunnel: we all internet differently now. And by that, I mean we internet everything. We’ve always internetted for leisure. That’s for sure. Prior to the COVID-19 thing, internetting was always about streaming and surfing, casual research and rabbit holes. But now we’ve adapted to the constrictions of distance and staying in to a point of learning how to internet beyond personal amusement. Now we do it for life stuff, professional stuff, and career stuff just the same. And us glass folks – as “handsy” as we are as makers, as communally-reliant as we are in both theory and practice – we’ve had an especially interesting evolution to the digital shift. We internet our glass teaching and learning (for workshops and university alike). We internet our glass conferences and seminars. We internet our studio demos, our talks, our exhibitions. The
18
Woven Light, 2021, Madeline Rile Smith, United States. Artists Commission Award, GMTF 2021 Photo Credit: Jacob Polcyn Evans
Pool, 2021, Flora deBechi, Scotland Artists Commission Award, GMTF 2021
cultural nuances within this shift of a glass-specific field to the digital realm really deserves its own series of essays, but what began as an impossible pill to swallow back in March 2020 – a place where the real space/real time/right-in-front-of-you realities of glass and glass culture had to somehow live in a remote modality – has GASNEWS
lent way to incredible online loopholes ever since. Some that have been interesting. Some that have been unexpected. Some that have been important. And then a few that have been all the above…to a point of both broadening our field’s trajectory and deepening its effectiveness.
SUMMER 2021
VOLUME 35, ISSUE 1
