a certain arrogance in our class now. We all used to treat video as a tribal affair. We were humbled by the learning experience then. At the beginning we had a need for each other in an almost pathetic instinct of survival. But you are right, we took video beyond the call of beauty. We found a message in the way we disseminated it. The show and tell became ritualized, formalized and certainly didactic in parts. Our generation was willing to accept this form of instruction. It became a rewarding part of our making. In that sense, the educational system has totally failed.

D.F. It has failed. One of the things I think about the educational system, and this is a big debate in France right now, is that as the idea of using new technologies to create became more and more accepted on an official level, it became sufficient for schools just to supply machines and then after that something magical was supposed to happen. And basically, that's all we have ever taught people was how to make them work, and how to make them work according to the manual. And I mean computers are the best examples. Most of the schools that teach computers, teach how to run particular software. But they don't tell you how the whole damn thing works, so that you can turn it upside down and backwards like anything else. And that part of it is lacking. Totally.

W.V. There was a time we believed we were a part of a reform movement, we believed in a sort of intellectual media supervision in the style of the left. Now we feel that the evolution is becoming automatic. Technology is driving a certain part of it. We are trying to adjust to it, but it is beyond our grasp. This unbelievable need for change is conceptually here but there is no curriculum through which you can put a finger on it. It is not within the experience of a teacher. It is not a matter of intelligence. Even if you are an excellent artist, have a fabulous reputation and all the abilities, you still get stuck in this moment of history and the latest technological invention.

D.F. It's a problem finding exactly the key to bring that kind of energy to people twenty-five years later. It is very, very hard to find that point where they can get into it with the same mentality, to go profoundly enough into the technology to understand what it's all about, to know that you're not just manipulating images on a screen, but that you're manipulating something much more profound, both technically and psychologically. One of the things we talked about yesterday was this revival of feedback and the fact that my students are all hooked on feedback. When they're not in class, they are out there playing with feedback. I think it's kind of funny.

W.V. All this talk about "high tech" makes me crazy. It is not about that, it is about understanding. On a certain level, once you understand, you can make it obsolete.

D.F. What we are talking about too, is trying to find exactly that key to get people into the new technologies. What's the right mentality? And not the fact that they're not going to use them the way the manual says it's supposed to

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