Losing my religion

It was supposed to be a routine spring cleaning of the machine... back-up files and save the drivers from the main drive in another drive, reformat, install the operating system, re-install the drivers... but in an age where almost everything is disposable, the wrong drive was reformatted, and in the click of the mouse, 10 years of production files, 6 years of photographs, articles, ideas, scripts, libretti... gone.

I spend hours everyday pounding on this keyboard, clicking this mouse, telling stories, composing images, making music... this has been my altar ever since that Pentium 300 13 years ago... I should've lost my mind, blown my top, cried even.

But I surprised even myself when I just shrugged it off and told Arkhe, a friend, inaanak and colleague whom I asked to help me overhaul the computer, the one who cliked the fateful click, to just forget and not worry about it... we'll just have to stack up a new digital pile of production files, shoot new photos, write new articles, come up with new ideas, write new scripts and libretti...

The bulk of the files in that drive were openSpace files... photos from performances staged more than a decade ago to ones staged just a few weeks ago... poster studies, property plots, checklists, stage managers' files, attendance sheets, budgets. I think I have a few of these production files saved on DVDs somewhere, I think I'd get a couple of scrapbooks today and start putting together hard copies of production books... with everything the digital age is, still nothing beats ink on paper.

It's ok, because, it's about time we purge some of the group's baggages. It's ok because there's more where all those lost files came from. It's ok because maybe it's time to move on with a clean slate because I believe openSpace is entering a new phase, stage, age... after all those years of trying to find our footing, I think we finally did. And on top of everything that fell into place in the group's last two productions, I believe what worked for us were the absence of malice; sincerity; the presence of everyone who were ther for one thing: to tell a good story and to tell it well, first and foremost. If a poisonous seed was planted, it was ignored or killed instantly. No hidden agendas, everything was out in the open. No whispers backstage (everything was said out loud), no second-hand information (nothing alterred, everything as it is and should be). There were no core groups, secondary groups, outsiders, newcomers, old-timers: there was only ONE group, there were only artists united by a vision: explore all artistic possibilities in communicating ideas.

Another friend sent me a program via email that can attmept to retrieve the files... I haven't opened it. Do I really need to? Do I really want to?

Tomorrow I will be sitting down with two colleagues to discuss the feasibility of a multimedia studio and what to do the rest of the year.

The status quo's fine with me for now.