I’ve encountered a problem. I’m not sure if I actually am sick of working in VR, as in wearing the headset and making art in it, and thus looking for any sort of distraction, or if I just love electricity so much that it has completely thwarted my VR art-making for the past few days.
I’m going to address the second possibility first, because there’s much to be explored there. I’m currently checking my phone every few seconds, desperately awaiting a comment from anyone on Facebook or Instagram, or a message from the one electrician and two contractors I know, for feedback about a circuitry diagram I posted. Since Sunday night (it’s now Wednesday mid-afternoon), I’ve been obsessively trying to install a dimmer switch in my bathroom. I’ve now shorted no less than three dimmers (at a cost of $ 16 each plus tax), and though I’ve since come up with a new solution, I’m not allowing myself to expense another attempt till someone points out a flaw in my diagram. Before I go further, I would just like to point out that I’m well aware that a dimmer should be a fairly simple install as far as basic household wiring is concerned. And unfortunately, my first mistake was in applying that assumption when dismantling the wires that connected the original light and fan switches that sit next to it. Aside from these two components, it turned out the lighting for my bedroom and stove hood are also members of the same junction box. I learned this on Sunday night, when I first found I was dimming the stove light and nothing else, then when I ‘successfully’ wired up the bathroom dimmer, after texting a friend to say “guys aren’t that smart”, also discovered I was dimming the stove and bedroom light too. Not only that, but I couldn’t have the bedroom light on without the bathroom light on as well. So, not all that successful.
On Monday night, I shorted the first dimmer, and shocked myself twice. I wound up uncoiling all the wiring in the box, as there was no other way of figuring out what all of it did.
Last night (Tuesday) I put it all back together again. I then shorted the second dimmer. Before 8am this morning and a few shocks later, I was back at it, finally isolating and labelling every wire through many trips back and forth from my bathroom to the breaker box in the hallway closet. At 2pm I set out on my bike for yet another digital dimmer switch (in hindsight analogue would have been far more cost efficient as it wouldn’t contain the fragile chip I kept blowing). I was brimming with anticipation (“Imagine, imagine it works, and I’ve solved it all myself?”) so much that I tore into my bathroom without taking off my shoes, coat or fanny pack.
It worked. Glee rushed through me as I hit the breaker and saw that the bathroom light (already set to ‘on’ – probably unwise) was now dimmed. But when I slid the dimmer up a little further, it worked for a few milliseconds, then pop went the third dimmer’s circuit board.

On account of a required code-meets-electronics course in first year in my Masters program, I should probably know a little more about electricity. Although to be fair, we never worked with household wiring, or even much more than batteries for that matter. From that class, I did learn that a circuit needs to start with a power source and end with a ground, but those additional factors, ie. ‘load’ : the connection to the light, fan, speaker, sensor, etc, and ‘data’ : the connection that leads to whatever may benefit from a reading, always threw me off. I’ll chalk this up to two excuses: 1) I was teaching two classes at another college at the time, and what little energy I had left for my studies was also depleted by the throws of a slowly-crumbling relationship, and 2) I have a terrible habit of being too impatient to read technical instructions all the way through. I do try, but I pay half-attention at best and as soon as I have an inkling of confidence, I chuck the book or laptop aside to get my hands dirty (or shocked). I get too excited about a potential solution, and suffer out more hours of frustration than might’ve been necessary had I focused more on thinking the whole operation through.

Since writing the above, I have made a second trip today, yes, for a fourth dimmer. This time I worked it into my daily pandemic-sanity exercise routine, by jogging the rough mile to the Canadian Tire and back, clutching the new dimmer in hand. I was feeling more pumped than ever this round, having just gotten off a video call with my Swiss friend Noah, a lighting engineer in the film industry who resides in England but is presently sailing solo (literally) along the Amalfi coastline. Noah had attempted to gloat with pictures and videos of his surroundings, and I did unwillingly glance at a sparkling coastline of serene villages with the moon lighting up the lapping waves. But I’d spent more than half the day in my underwear (that’s as much progress I had made out of my pyjamas), wiring up a junction box in a dark bathroom with my phone’s flashlight propped up on the sink, only finally getting dressed (somewhat insanely) for the first dimmer run, and sustained by ample coffee and frantic bites straight from a container of cold, leftover chicken. All the loveliest moonlight on the finest coasts of the world, and I suppose Noah’s was among them, weren’t going to distract me from that dimmer. Besides, I once spent two full weeks on that same tiny ‘yacht’ (major oversell) with Noah, puttering through the canals of Northern France where we relied heavily on wine and gin ‘cocktails’ (cucumber slices and fizz) as a buffer to keep us from killing each other. It’s somewhat amazing that we’re still friends, but I’m good to trade it up for electrical work in a windowless bathroom in Parkdale.

Noah had walked through the diagram with me, impressed at how I ploughed over terms like three-way switch and single-pole switch. By the way, he referred to the ground wire as “earth”, which fits right in with how the Brits refer to an elevator as a “lift”, among other terms of literal endearment. His contribution to the dimmer plight was in pointing out that the two switch boxes didn’t need to be connected to one another, even though I’d found them that way, but could each be their own circuits.
I got both circuits rigged up and ready, and just needed a new (working) dimmer. But still not getting any dim action though I’d seemingly done everything right (at least according to Noah), I assumed the flaw in the design must be something minor. I impulsively connected the ‘earth’ wire to the coil of exposed copper wires in the junction box, you know, just to see if that did the trick. It didn’t like that one bit. When I hit the breaker, the light in my hallway flickered, simultaneously with the loudest ‘pop’ sound yet. For a minute I was scared I’d messed up the wiring in my building somewhere (and really, I’m surprised I haven’t yet). But once I dismantled that earth wire, everything worked as normal, though yet again, with a newly busted dimmer.

Save for a handful of one-offs that served to affirm a lack of natural talent, I’ve never so much as even tried skateboarding. I’ve always been okay with my skateboarding career peaking when at age 9 or 10, my friends and I would sit back to back on my brother’s deck, using our feet to wheel us, like a siamese twin crab, through the neighbourhood to the road that winded around down the length of our school. We’d tear down that hill screaming, entrusting our fate to the sharp instincts of drivers in oncoming vehicles. Stupid though we knew it was, nothing had ever been as terrifying or exhilarating. But that is not skateboarding.

My best friend in high school, Andrew, used to skate. He was little, but bigger guys ran circles around him vying for his attention, on account of his deadpan wit and his skill on a skateboard. In class, Andrew could always be seen holding some tiny object like an eraser, or sometimes nothing at all, his thumb, index and middle-finger all loosely pinched together. His eyes would be locked on that point where his fingertips met, as his arm swam through the air as though he were conducting an orchestra through spinning accidentals, hovering intervals and accelerating descents through scales of detached notes and slurs. I can’t recall the moment that I realized that these motions were actually ollies, 180s, kick flips and rail grinds, or that if I’d known it all along, but I do remember that it felt almost as mesmerizing to watch his hand in motion as it must have been for him. When I was a kid riding in the backseat of a car, I had done something similar, where I’d imagine myself running with gazelle strides alongside the car, gracefully clearing any obstacle in my path, be it a sign post, a tree or the rhythmic interruption of phone poles, my feet gingerly landing just long enough to launch into my next leap. Both are gratifying mental exercises in imagining yourself moving through the world with abandoned precision, the sort of activity kids think up before their lives become too contorted by the very constraints those games are evading.

Skateboarding is a natural backdrop of urban kid culture, one that depending on the circles you travel through can be hard to ignore but even harder to gain access to. At least that’s how it once was; a lot more misogynistic, where ragged boys challenged each other with tricks like a an airborne dual over concrete as the girls, if they were present at all, sat by with their hair in ironic pigtails. Though I was never really involved, I witnessed how skate culture changed over the years, to a large extent shaped by the role models who had been the best skaters in the world in their prime.
This leadership was taken up by the neighbourhood skaters I grew up with, whom in their 20s volunteered their time building community skateparks and in their 30s, raising funds for those parks as well as educational programs that promoted inclusivity. Occasionally I’ll come across a social media snippet, a viral video of a four or five year old girl, building air on a halfpipe, with an expression unfamiliar to my own childhood – one of unbridled and entitled dominance, mixed with a spark of utter joy and reposed yet focused nonchalance. Sometimes the adulating cheers of grownups and kids would rise with the tricks like waves to lift her higher, but more often there is the silence that tells of the scraped knees and elbows over hours spent practicing, locked in step and rhythm with the sound of the hard rubber wheels as they leave and return to the ground. These videos can and do occasionally bring me to tears, overcome by pride in how far women have come, as well as a gratitude for the men who have believed in them along the way. But those tears come as well from a deep pit of frustration that must be shared by all women, for every childhood memory of being told that girls can’t (fill in the blank). And for this little girl who now shreds through the plywood walls of a boys clubhouse so that the planks splinter as they explode in her wake, in a way I had only dreamed of, in dreams where I learned to set limits about how high I was allowed to soar.
I dated a skateboarder on and off over the course of a couple of years. We were too old by then to call him a skater, in the sense that if someone were to ask what my boyfriend did, the response would refer to his occupation (electrician, ironically) rather than the past-time where he became alive. It was to a large extent a reason for our breakups, in that he needed to be on that deck at least and no less than five days a week. He had been through some stuff in his 20s, and to him skateboarding was therapy. In my efforts to understand him I learned to see the truth in how he explained it. Learning a new trick involved hours that became weeks of sometimes literally bone-breaking attempts. It required a focus so intense that no affordance could be given to a distracting thought of any sort, be it hunger or fatigue or a fuming girlfriend.
There was an addiction in this, the need to train the physics of your body over your surroundings by the simple means of a wooden board on wheels as you wrestle against the reality of gravity and the constant threat of hard surfaces. The danger of harming oneself was seen only as a setback to the challenge rather than the threat of pain. Like most who push their athleticism beyond the threshold of elasticity of youth, he had to grapple with the handicap of a reoccurring injury. In his case it was the frequent dislocation of his right shoulder. I’d sat with him in the ER after he’d popped for the umpteenth time while taking a hard fall on a new trick attempt, and in the idle weeks that followed, while he dutifully waited out the recovery time so as to minimize the risk of repeated and potentially permanent damage, I came to agree that he was better off skating than sitting around grumbling next to me. He followed a daily regimen of 200 pushups to reinforce the muscle tissue in his back and shoulders, all in the name of keeping him on that deck and out of the ER.

What had been difficult for me to comprehend about the skating was that there was no worldly goal involved. He was not only aware but encouraging of the kids in the skatepark outperforming him at half his age. There were no titles to strive for, the battle was entirely against himself. I’d had a friend growing up who had through her childhood and teenage years, woken at 4am for swim practice and again after school, totalling six hours of training a day, with a dream of qualifying for the Olympics. But she had continued the disciplined practice at the cost of a ‘normal’ life, long after the chance of making the national team, never mind earning a medal, had come and gone. I think if you’re lucky, at some point the quest for being the best reveals itself for what it was all along, a means of escaping the world around you in order to connect wholly with the world you strive to conquer within.
I took it for granted that I used to do this with art. Unlike skateboarding, swimming and all athletic sports that require the agility of a young body in competition, art is a long game where at any point in a lifetime success can suddenly, finally arrive, or as the cliché goes, after you’ve died. The dream of being seen persists albeit dormant in your perseverance, simultaneously pushing and thwarting that connection with your inner world. When at troublesome times it’s suggested that I channel what I’m experiencing emotionally through art, I feel a repulsion to the idea of it. So marred has that means of an outlet become with a competitive strive in an external arena of acknowledgement and income that the wires have been crossed. It has become too permeated through the years by the demands of success that the escape I can find so easily in writing has been reduced to occasional, fleeting moments in art. I write these posts as though I have already earned a wide-reaching platform of engaged readers and don’t pay any mind to the fact that, in spite of the invitations I dole out, no one reads it at all. In the sacrifice of gaining actual traction as a writer, ego has been denied a seat at the table while self-expression is the guest of honour.
When I woke up this morning, eager to get straight to my desk to continue this passage, with the ever-expanding challenge of tying all the loose ends of this piece together into an intrinsic whole, I suddenly understood the addiction to skateboarding. The goal is that tying together of what is currently a mess of loose tangents (or wires) that once unified, will invent themselves as a melody of my own making. In the same way as the mind training the dynamics of muscle movements and motor-reflexes to dominate the boundaries of physics in landing a trick for the first time, the rush of that promised conquering becomes like a junky’s need for a fix. It’s not only easy to tune everything else out, but inconceivable and to a point almost offensive to allow any distraction, be it a dislocated shoulder or a looming thesis, from obtaining further ground toward that goal.

I have that dimmer to thank for clarifying the importance of that rush this past week. In the hours I’ve poured into the sculpting of a human figure in virtual space, I’d lost sight of the forest through the trees. After a certain point it no longer sufficed to simply engage in doing it for the sake of it, or understanding why it was so important for me to study and perfect the potential I’d found in the Hull brush, the one tool I’d been bragging about for weeks. The goal had become abstract to the point that I felt I was working in an existential vacuum, not a great place for creative energies to be nourished. The problem was not the external conquest of being recognized as the best at or even ‘good’ at the skill of sculpting with the Hull brush, or art-making in VR in general, or even that I’d grown tired of trying. It was simply that I no longer cared. I don’t mean that apathetically, but rather in the sense of my swimmer friend who kept on with the laps at dawn with dreams of being the best behind her, I’ve outgrown the need for a competitive strive against the external world. Only unlike her, that dimmer pointed out that I didn’t love the art-making enough to have it pull me from my bed in the morning.
Meanwhile, with the intent of going to the bathroom as a routine part of waking up, this week I found myself remaining in that confined, dark space, tampering with electrical wires from 7:30 am till mid-afternoon. As the days passed, the need to leave the bathroom for anything other than getting to the breaker in the adjacent hallway closet became an annoying disturbance. When I wasn’t in there, I was playing with the riddle of those wires in my mind until a new possible answer had me rushing back in without a moment’s hesitation. The hours not only flew by, they just fell away in the blink of an eye. I was completely fixated, addicted, to the act of reaching that goal, landing that trick, the promised reward of a properly working dimmer and fan at the cost of no less than five dimmers, many shocks, cuts on my fingertips, and lost time on my thesis work.

I was aware all the while that the main impediment was a lack of understanding of household electrical wiring. Playing around with the wires was therefore like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle while wearing gloves and a blindfold. But I was also aware of the crest that lay just beyond the brink of my frustration – that getting that dimmer to work would mean I’d resolved the riddle. The need for the dimmer itself was was diminished – pun intended – by my hunger to conquer a question that had a definite, concrete, path of response.
I once read an article about an actor who had spent two decades in theatre. While out with friends placing bets at a racetrack, he found an unexpected joy in number crunching that led to a mid-career change as an accountant. I was still in high school at the time of reading it, but already I felt like I understood. It made sense that concrete answers, right or wrongs, the boolean signposts of logic, can be for artists like buoys or islands in a stormy ocean. When you lose sight of your destination, or when your arms grow tired from the fatigue of questioning what you’re swimming for, the oasis of reason will always be there, mocking or offering mercy to your cold skin and struggling lungs with the warm sun and fresh air of a known truth.
When I was in grade 10, I was going through a particularly confusing time in my teenhood. As far as the ecosystem of being 15 went, I no longer knew my place. I’d grown weary of trying to be cool or fitting in with the popular kids but the three years I’d invested in trying to do exactly that had left me too far behind in nerd culture to keep up with that crew either. I was also starting to consider my future, when my options were still wide open enough to have days when I’d decide I was going to be a plastic surgeon and others where I planned to hightail it to Paris straight after graduation to become a famous painter. Reality was telling a different story though. My grades in all classes were abysmal, to the point that teachers were adding notes of grave concern next to the D’s on my report card to the effect of “your kid is heading up shit creek, FYI.” My art teacher, who had been so unnerved by my attitude and antics in grade 9 that in the first week of September, she set me up with hallway mural projects. She blatantly admitted the intent was to keep me out of her classroom for as long as possible (smart move on several levels).
The one subject that stood out was the electricity unit in science class. It was the only homework I’d ever become hooked on. Math was becoming very abstract and complex, while electricity was plug-n-play. The crucial difference was that the key factor, power, actually meant something real and exciting, rather than solving for that ever-evasive ‘x’. The job was the same in algebra equations as it was in electrical problems: for both ‘x’ and power, there was a starting point and end point, and your job was to get it through the maze and have it perform certain tasks along the way. All there was to do was learn definitions, give them values, and put them to work. But in a time when your own identity was itself an unresolved ‘x’, it felt very self-affirming to be able to wield terms like “conduct”, “charge” and “voltage” in a way that you could have control over.
Though it was mostly textbook learning and could not have been taught more dryly, I must have understood that electricity had incredible creative potential. It was the only occasion in school, never mind science class, that I received 100%, making a stark contrast that probably should have been flagged by the few eyes my GPA mattered to. I was so proud of it too, because I knew I’d earned it. I’d studied it to the point that every detail made sense. It’s too bad I wasn’t at an alternative school, where I might’ve been able to continue with electricity projects once it became apparent how it lit a spark in me (pun absolutely intended). But we moved on to something else the following month and I went right back to sleeping my way through class.

When visiting my brother in London over the Holiday season of 2017, I’d once accompanied that same ‘yacht’ buddy Noah to a routine lighting gig on the set of a TV show. Both the show and Noah’s job seemed pretty dull, but I became fixated on the large panels of RGB lights around the set. Noah’s inputs could generate those panels to project any shade of colour in the spectrum, and this was blowing my mind. Thanks to my years of working as a designer and instructor of RBG colour systems in digital painting, I understood how the inputs worked – it was a direct translation from what I’d already been doing with pixels. After berating Noah with questions to affirm that this insane thought had actual grounding, I stood there shaking my head. Holy shit. You can paint with light.
It was at this point that all sorts of connections were firing off in my mind. The first and hardest-hitting was the sudden realization that in my lifetime, or at least since my teenage years when the spinning coin of my future decidedly fell on the side of art, in teaching myself to draw and paint from observation, all I had mostly been doing was studying the behaviours and affects of light. It struck home that light was the root of fine art in a very literal sense. The impressionists? Impressions of light. Rembrandt? contrasts of light. Turner? weather-affected light. Paint suddenly seemed like a colouring book when electricity could be the canvas. Why not go straight to the source?
When I got back to my brother’s house, I passed on an invitation to go out on the town with him and his friends so I could nerd out hard with the internet. I did a deep dive, searching for any and every type of lighting project that artists had worked on, and down the rabbit hole I went. I found out about conductive paint, and that it was possible to make it yourself with some easily acquired materials. I found ink paintings that were subtly backlit by fibre optic strands and sensors so that light would diffuse the surface of the paper, following you, the viewer, as you walked past it. I would later find many more, my favourite being the
fields of light by the artist Bruce Munro.
While perusing the aisles of my local library a while later, I came across a shelf full of books about fun DIY electricity projects. I took all of them home with me (and wracked up some hefty overdue fines, let me tell you), and started to learn about how LEDs and RGB lighting systems worked. In the early mornings before getting to the tasks of my freelance work, I would sketch out grids of RGB panels, toying with the interplay of the hues. I had no idea what was actually possible or how tangible (read: hard) it would be to build into working displays, and answers weren’t easy to come across.

It was what led me to apply to this Masters program. In my application essay, I dreamed up a thesis project that entailed interactive light displays that audiences could engage with in public spaces. Better yet, my essay toted, people could use these displays to communicate with one another remotely, that is, from different parts of the world. I described a scenario where a lonely homeless person could stand in a park in Toronto, and with hand gestures, animate patterns of light in the trees. Meanwhile in a desolate town square in Istanbul, a similarly lonely person could be walking through an open space, and noticing the lights already being animated while no one present appeared to be controlling them, figure out that someone elsewhere was doing it. They could then, with similar hand gestures, create responding patterns in the light displays from their own location, engaging both in a poetic interplay. The world is beautiful again, and someone, somewhere, sees you.
I still love this idea. I also love the thought of designing wings for dolphins so that when they jump, they can soar and do many tricks in the air to our delight before plunging again. It’s a great thought but am I the best person to figure out how to pull something like that off, or more practically speaking, is trying to do it really the best use of my time?
It’s a little embarrassing, in hindsight. After being accepted into the program, I asked to meet with the director, Kate Hartman, somehow managing to overlook the clout her name garnished in the world of wearable electronics. Kate was and remains the authority on projects of this sort, but I suppose on her end, as I described the project, she might’ve been keeping an open mind. Who knew what I would actually be capable of pulling off?
As it turned out, not a lot. Working with electronics turned out being not unlike my first real attempt at rock climbing, when after exactly one lunch-hour trip to a climbing gym, I decided that my personality and the way I’m built made me a natural for the sport. I talked the talk all the way to a Koh Yao, a remote island in Thailand where in the lone company of a travel buddy who was part Swiss mountain goat, part Yahtzee-playing, socially-awkward, arrogant Swiss man, I was made to walk the walk. Specifically, that meant hanging suspended halfway up a 90º rock, begging him to slack me back down as he glared at me with deceived despondence.

It was a hard hit for me, learning that a good mark in high school or a good run in a climbing gym does not entail a natural ability the way that it worked out with drawing and painting. It turned out that electricity, as goes for rock climbing, requires a lot more patience and failure than I was prepared for . It’s one thing to read about it and memorize all the ways a circuit can be built, and a whole other thing to try and build a parallel circuit with a soldering needle, sensors, RGB LEDS and, ugh. Code. A few months into the course project challenges, along with having to figure out how to work with others in groups, was enough to make me grateful for my drawing talent, my lifelong failsafe when it came to attempts at being good at anything else.
When I had vented these frustrations over a drink with a friend, about the difficulties in code and electronics, he just shook his head at me as though to say, ‘what were you even thinking?’ Then, in regards to my thesis he offered up some sound advice: “Stick to what you’re good at. Figure out some kind of art style that no one else has done, get amazing at it, then get it out there.” Simple. It was therefore, and I’m admitting it here, a matter of vain practicality that led me towards art in VR. And here I am, already bored of it. But the problem isn’t virtual reality. It’s that I’m pretty sure I’ve grown tired of feeling like I have to rely on my art skills in order to do anything of significance. Ten years ago, it likely would have been a very different story. I’d have pushed it, driven by the desire to stand out in this new medium by thrusting my drawing talent to the forefront. But I don’t really know if it would have been for the love of making art even then. I think it was just because it seemed like my best shot at a ticket to success.

There have been moments when I could make art that had meaning, but I exploited my own skill in the effort to make a name for myself. But I can’t honestly recall the last time in recent years that trying to be the best at art got me out of bed, not in a way that was exciting. In these monotonous days that slowly encroach the sanctions of sanity as we face down a pandemic winter, having reasons to want to get out of bed are kind of paramount. The dimmer got me out of bed. Writing gets me out of bed. Getting out of bed is no longer about a game of getting things done; it’s a question of survival.

I love the metaphors in electricity. After a particularly long stretch of grad school assignments last fall, I treated myself to a pizza and a half litre of wine in a local bar on my way home from teaching a night class. I sat talking to the owner, and a few glasses in, found myself making an analogy about how electricity was like karma. It begins at the source (you), it gets sent through a series of actions (your deeds), and whether to good or destructive affects, will inevitably find its way back home (boom). There’s a simplicity in its nature, it has principles that if ignored or misused, can lead to relatively terrible consequences, from a few small shocks and $75 worth of dimmers, to a fire that could cause my already dilapidated building to implode. There’s an austerity to the terms “live wires”, “load”, “neutral” and “ground” for this reason. Pixels and pigments have a way of falling to the wayside when you try something new with that live wire and run to the breaker with the hit-or-miss anticipation of a quick-fix or a short circuit. You are, in the most literal sense, messing with the hard rules of reality.

In the end, it was my old friend Boris who helped me get the power through the odyssey of a working fan and dimmer switch. Noah had played a helpful hand in advising the two separate circuits, but had set me back somewhat in telling me I was wrong to use the fan and light-fixture wires as the load. I had that morning realized that the wires that did stuff, ie. the fan, the bathroom light, and the lights for the other rooms, were in fact load wires. Of the five black wires in the junction box, I had identified all but one. I had previously thought this might be the ‘load’ wire, since I didn’t know anything and was just guessing as I went. Noah incorrectly confirmed this assumption, thus negating my accurate attempt to use the fan wire as the load itself. When I later pointed this out to him, he chalked it up to being both drunk and high at the time (and that’s the chief reason among many why you don’t get stuck on a dingy with Noah for two weeks).

When Boris called, it was after I’d returned from my run to Canadian Tire for the second time that day, for the fourth dimmer, which, thanks to Noah’s misinformation about the load wire, I zapped within a minute of getting through the front door. Mark, another childhood friend / contractor who I had harassed with messages earlier that day, checked in around then, suggesting I ask Boris. Apparently in his years of getting by with renovation work, Boris learned a thing or two about wiring setups in old buildings. Boris is a talented artist whom I’ve shared a kinship with since we met in grade 9 and poured through each others’ sketchbooks. We grew up together and as adults, shared studio space for years. He is like family to me and has been suffering the grief of loss of the same friend from our small circle earlier this year. And while also being the gentlest, kindest soul I’ve ever encountered, in spite of all this, I refused to call him.

That last busted dimmer had sent me spiralling into the ‘no fair’ zone, that perhaps only tired young children and women in the throes of PMS (a factor of the last week) are truly familiar with. Even now it seems entirely justified, the bout of tears and baby animal whimpers, as I puttered around my apartment in a state of utter dejection. Not terribly adult, maybe, but in the moment I felt the weight of it. I knew the four days spent trying to get that dimer working was about something that went deeper than being bored of VR and definitely beyond the need to have softer lighting options in my dismal bathroom. The adult in me was gently trying to point out that it was nothing that a meal and an hour or two of a good tv show couldn’t fix, because what was really wrong couldn’t be resolved by a dimmer either.
In that moment, the problem was that my time was up. The following day, an electrician friend was going to be dropping by to get it all sorted out, and it was this that was causing the tears. I’d so desperately wanted to get it done on my own, without a man coming along to do what I couldn’t, regardless of it being his trade. The tears were coming from that place of doubt within me, the one that’s grown bigger with every STEM problem I haven’t been able to solve without help since, against my best efforts, failing out of grade 11 advanced math class. The tears were for the amount of hair I’ve pulled out at 4am, refusing to throw in the towel after 12 hours of trying to make what ought to be a fairly simple piece of code perform the way I want it to. And going further back: the animation rigs built in Maya that didn’t move as they’re supposed to, the batch processing in Photoshop not saving the files properly after a dozen attempts, the rendering of animation and video files overloading the RAM and crashing the system, and the 8 am trigonometry quizzes forced on the students as a means of penalizing the students who didn’t (couldn’t) complete their homework. Why, STEM. Why don’t I understand you. Where is our harmony broken? Why can’t we just…be… friends?
It was more than that. It was the battle for a small win in a bad fucking year. In the face of the pandemic, the sudden death of a lifelong love had in recent months unleashed a barrage of unresolved inner struggles, hidden shames and terrors, the tune of which I have been waking up and falling asleep to for months as my mind processes while I wait out the long days til my next therapy session. I’m holding down, rolling with the punches, strong and determined, but also weak and exhausted from the grief. I hadn’t known it or even given it any thought, but it turned out what I needed more than anything this week was to land a new trick. And the electrician coming the next day was like after giving it everything I had, sitting down on the sidelines with the girls in pigtails while watching someone do the trick a thousand times better.

Though I’d passed on the suggestion to call on Boris, Mark had gone ahead and reached out to him anyway. I think it had become by then an intervention of sorts. Boris called me and asked me to walk him through it. When you go through these sort of gruelling experiences, if you are very lucky, you might come out of it with a life moment that makes it worthwhile regardless of the outcome. Angling my phone’s camera at the innards of the junction box, Boris and I chattered on about the wires like we were gossiping about our friends. We had come to know each of them and their characteristics through our own means and in our own ways, but because of a mutual familiarity through decades of friendship, eased the technicalities into a language built on humour and affection.
Boris saw it, the single flaw in my system, that one disjunction between Noah’s separate circuits and my own doubt in how the load should have worked. With the simple disconnection of the extra wire I had spliced in from the mystery wire to the fan wire, and connecting that fan wire directly to the fan switch as I had done before calling Noah, everything worked. I was finally able to sit back and reflect on what it was that made electricity so satisfying, in spite of all the Hell it had brought forth. From his knowing years as an artist, Boris sagely agreed. “Once you figure it out, it can stay that way in a house and last a hundred years.”
It made electricity seem more beautiful for being such a fundamental, undisputed, universal system of logic that two artist friends could chat about it with a mutual understanding we’ve never shared for an art material. All the more so when, even as defunct systems in old houses, like the friendships that remain when your house of cards has fallen, it stands the test of time.

When my electrician friend Dave arrived the next day (Thursday), I was ready and waiting with a fifth dimmer. Though I knew this time I finally had it, that hooking this dimmer up meant it would definitely work, I couldn’t afford the risk of anything going wrong and Dave leaving the premises without the job signed and delivered. I perched on the toilet seat behind him, as Dave tore every last wire out of the plastic screws I’d used to splice the wires. While peering over his shoulder as he worked, it was as though, after days spent accumulating bruises in attempting the new trick, I was suddenly cheering him on from the sidelines with my hair in pigtails, as he performed it with ease and grace. That they actually refer to those plastic connecting screws ‘pigtails’ pours the irony on thick. He rewired it all securely within a few minutes, and with a little gizmo that lights up when you stick it in an electrical socket, easily figured out mystery wire. It belonged to the outlet that charges my toothbrush. This may strike you as obvious, but I had in fact tested it. Only its light had stayed on deceptively, (charged by the battery), thus throwing me off the trail. Thankfully he left without assembling the components and sealing them in with the switch-plate I’d purchased, leaving me to at least wrap up the job. I never in my life could have guessed that a nickel switch-plate could bring me a sense of empowerment every time I sit on the toilet, but under that plate is three hard damn days of my pandemic year that accumulated riddle I solved – with a tiny bit of help – myself.

I haven’t concluded that I love electricity more than art-making. Rather from electricity I learned that if I’m going to continue making art, it needs to be fuelled by an internal conquest that serves as a form of therapy. It needs objectives and rules of conduct because without them, it risks getting lost in the maze and not finding its way back to the source. Art needs to be shielded from the external strive for success by means of a childlike desire to escape the constraints of an adult world. On the other hand, it needs to be nourished by the self-assurance of the adult within that it must always be okay for self-expression to sit at the head of the table. That self-expression is a such a valued guest because it alone can explore the many facets of my identity, be it lost, confused, suppressed or evolving. I will likely never land or even attempt an ollie, but with a brush in my hand I can wield the power of the little girl smashing through the boys’ clubhouse, while encouraging kids half my age to smash it harder. That is why art still needs to matter to me. And for now, that needs to be reason enough.
Whether in art or writing or electricity, there is a riddle to be found in every task, where the most seemingly mundane may uncover the most daunting of puzzles. In those cases it’s easy to get lost in the overwhelming complexities. When you grow tired and weary, friends can be like those boolean truths, appearing as buoys, islands, and signposts to help you make your way out of the abyss.
My dimmer odyssey ends here, bringing with it the treasures of my travels beyond a manifesto about self-affirmation in creativity and motivational wake-up calls. Wrapped delicately in sheaths of spun of silkworm nestled securely in the hull of the boat (“yacht”) is the new beating heart of this thesis. In exploring the depths of that physical connection between art and energy : light, I’ve uncovered a key that permits me the interplay of both without the need for STEM skills or RGB panels : simulation. I don’t know what that means just yet, but I do know it doesn’t happen in a junction box.

It happens in VR.