As a teen in the nineties, I was obsessed with Skinny Puppy. How obsessed? Well, I used to get mailed rare recordings and interviews from industrial music nerds around the world. I collected the entire discography on LP. Again, this was the nineties, before the online world turned mainstream.
After high school, I immediately enrolled in a digital media arts program at a private college. It was utting edge for its time. I created Macromedia Director projects – extremely visual interactive digital interfaces – exploring the history of Skinny Puppy.
One weekend I borrowed the school’s fancy Sony digital video camera, despite never having training. Again, this was the nineties. Nobody had digital cameras. Few had cell phones. And I spent the weekend driving around Vancouver on a pilgrimage to the important Skinny Puppy sites.
I edited the video together in Adobe Premiere and spliced it with rare interview clippings. I embedded this video into my final multimedia project at school, a project that exceeded expectations but is sadly lost to obsolete technology on a long-forgotten Jaz drive.
Until one day, I discovered the video exists on YouTube! I uploaded it 14 years before to an old, abandoned account. The video’s laughably amateur, horribly shaky, yet this time capsule of Vancouver and my teenage love for Skinny Puppy remains genuinely endearing.