"When I arrived on the Intermedia scene at the end of 1967 I had a good sense of how photography worked and was figuring out how I could use it to make art. Brian Nation, who had already built a darkroom at 575 Beatty, had recently moved on to other things so I moved my stuff in and got to work. It wasn't long after that that planning began for Intermedia Nights, the first of three annual spring "festivals" that Intermedia produced at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Intermedia Nights required promotional material. As the person with the camera, I naturally assumed the role of photographer and began to document the preparations and finally the event. At first I wasn't thinking about this documentary project in an art sense – it seemed like something which was necessary and it made me feel useful within the group. Then what started out as publicity became so interesting to me that I just carried on with it. So I began what would be a five-year project to document Intermedia's art and artists. I ended up with over 3,000 negatives which I have held on to for the past 40 years. Then, in 2003, I started on an archival research project based on my Intermedia material and the years I spent as a member of the society."
– Michael de Courcy

THE INTERMEDIA CATALOGUE

"It is our intention that Intermedia be a place where creative exploration could take place on an interactive basis between artists, between technologists and between seriously interested people. The only criteria that we have is that it is far out, creative and exploratory."

"I don't think it's very desirable to try and define Intermedia in too great detail at the moment because it's exploratory – we are, in a sense, discovering this thing into existence."

"We have tried in the setting up of this to create as unstructured an environment as possible. This is the essential difficulty involved in working within an existing institutional structure."
– Victor Doray and Joe Kyle on CBC radio in 1967

 

“Initially I was intended to put the destruct button into the system should it ever get to be too established and too successful because that would contravene the whole concept of exploration.”
– Werner Aellen (from "Vancouver Art and Artists")

 

 

Basically, they would hand us the keys and say goodnight. "The first Intermedia workshop was a four-storey former macaroni factory at 575 Beatty St. on the fringe of downtown Vancouver. There was little or no signage at the building entrance, just a small hand-lettered cardboard sign placed in the corner on the window beside the front door. It was nevertheless an impressive space in which one could easily get lost. There were two staircases and a large open wooden freight elevator. Dennis Vance lived in the building and functioned a sort of caretaker while he worked on his experimental sound projects. Otherwise there didn't seem to be a lot going on. I did meet David Orcutt, an older, bearded guy with a kind of beatnik look who it seemed had reluctantly agreed to function as the society's first project manager. Like Dennis, he was totally absorbed in his own art stuff in other rooms of the empty building and hardly noticed me. I remember seeing a business type in a suit and tie with camel hair overcoat pop in and out of the little office space next to the elevator on the mezzanine. He was friendly enough but seemed to me a little out of place in this cavernous and cluttered warehouse space, besides he never seemed to stay long enough to take off his coat. His name was Joe Kyle, a management consultant associated with the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. He had a visionary attitude towards education and the arts and been part of the original group of McLuhan enthusiasts from whose meetings the idea of an Intermedia had emerged. He was the chairman of the society's Board of Directors and as such was authorized to write cheques – which is probably what he was doing on his visits to the little office. The directors felt that their role would be best accomplished through a hands-off relationship with the day-to-day workings at the workshop. Workshop administration was left to David Orcutt and the society's artist members."
– Michael de Courcy

"I remember Joan and I taking apart the tape recorder that wasn't working and we didn't even have a screwdriver– so Joan got a rock and turned a nail into a screw driver. We figured if we could look inside it we could figure out something."
– Maxine Gadd

 

"There was a lot of dope. Some people were stoned pretty much all the time. Mostly it was hash and grass. At Intermedia it was a social thing and a work thing. There wasn't a lot of alcohol. Getting high seemed completely natural. Dope was used as fuel and one great side effect was that you got these groovy ideas. People were generally pretty focused on what they were doing, often working on projects well into the night. When Werner was hired as the executive producer he became the public face of the organization. He told me that the coming and going groups of hippie-looking artists and friends did attract the attention of the RCMP and city police, and they did try to infiltrate. Werner, as a matter of policy, turned a blind eye to the illegal drug activity going on in the building. He didn't disapprove of the membership getting high but he did feel that it would compromise his position to participate. If anyone did ask he wanted to be able to claim honestly that he wasn't aware of anything untoward going on. When an undercover person pretending to be an artist wanting to work with Intermedia did show up in the office, his clean-cut, rather uptight demeanor would give him away. Werner would simply ask to see a portfolio of his work and that would be that. They never came back."
– Michael de Courcy

 

 

"There was the idea of public participation and the idea that everybody was an artist,
everybody was a musician, anybody could paint, anybody could take photographs,
anybody could play the flute or whatever. . . there was a suspension of standards . . . it
was the last gasp of anti-specialism..."
– Maxine Gadd

 

Nobody was making any money.
Nobody was paying any money.

"At Intermedia I was able to quite naively explore the possibilities of film. I always say I was very fortunate that I didn't go to art school or that I didn't go to film school 'cause I was able to go in and make things which people would have told me were impossible to make — out of this blessed naivety really. That's something that has continued to influence me and affect me from my Intermedia days, the idea that I can do anything I want to in film. There are no rules or theory, there's nothing I can't do. I have the confidence to do everything from Intermedia days cause Intermedia really was my art school— spending 4 or 5 years working with Intermedia people taught me all I needed to know at that point about art and art-making.The few people who did have careers, who did know something about art , were very accepting of the rest of us, we weren't blocked in any way from entering the scene. We would do those great extravaganzas at the Vancouver Art Gallery and everyone was participating at an equal level. There was nobody saying "no you can't come in" and "you know, we have to shape the show to reflect some sort of idea or theory." We all just went in and did it . . . "
– Dave Rimmer

 

"Outside of what is recorded here, we never left any monument. There is no real physical evidence. There is nothing. It was like it was a dream. You go and ask people – what was Intermedia, you will get 50 stories from 50 different people all telling the same story but different."
– Dennis Vance

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