The Bin Under My Worktable
What changes when the tools and structures that once gave you creative grounding become obsolete?
For decades, I built my filmmaking practice around mastering techniques to control cameras, editing systems, and audio gear that required skill and perseverance. Now, random bits of equipment sit forgotten in a bin under my worktable while I navigate digital excessiveness and overwhelm. Everything is available in a million different ways, but not much feels particularly necessary. Trial, error, frustration and breakthrough taught me that creative courage and confidence comes alive in a completely different place.
In my attic room under the desk, I keep a bin with some personal media making tools I’ve collected and used for projects over the decades. A Nizo Super 8 camera, a pocket size Panasonic still camera, a couple of Canon DSLRs, random cables and microphones. I still keep the mini-videotape recorder I bought in the early 1990s, and a few pairs of headphones.
As I work on the laptop, the equipment sits there unused for years. When I look below, I don’t know why I can’t get rid of these forgotten objects taking up space.
I think about this while watching a tango concert at The Dome, an artist warehouse space in an Oakland industrial neighborhood. It holds the large ceramic pieces of its original owner, sculptor Peter Voulkos, and is maintained by his family as a private performance space. They also collect 20th century media making technologies which they display all around the cavernous rooms. Ancient 35mm film projectors sit next to 1940s vacuum tube television sets, 16mm film projectors placed near videotape decks and super-8mm cameras, next to Watchman sets flickering with fired up black and white images.
The equipment is solid, heavy and imposing like Voulkos’ dark, roughly textured sculptures scattered around among the media equipment. This paraphernalia, that wired together the world of cinema, television, and video required dedicated craft and a technical expertise learned in the field from grappling with its secrets. It was expensive, and only available in professional environments. Like the tools in my bin, eventually that gear found its way into artists’ hands to use and explore new forms of image-making and storytelling. Out of the friction and playfulness that came from pushing its limits, new cinematic grammar and visual art forms emerged.
It was this world and those times that captured me as a young artist. I entered a media arts and independent media scene where getting our hands on the equipment opened up a new world of possibility far from Hollywood. Learning to handle a camera, edit video and manipulate a sound mixer meant access to power.
It meant that we too, young people without money or connections, could create media that brought other sensations, other hidden worlds, and other voices to audiences who were curious and cared. Those tools changed our ideas and our relationship to expression. They made new forms come alive.
Creative people drawn to these media making instruments found one another around the country through collectives, local media centers, and exhibition spaces. New screen-based art forms attracted adventurous curators. As the new media arts scene grew, these works gained momentum, and began to be presented seriously in galleries, grassroots spaces, museums and film festivals.
In those years, my drive to make a media project came from handling and using the equipment around this network of experimentalists. I could belong in the company of filmmakers, curators, exhibitors and distributors, funders, educators, critics and artists who crossed genres.
A coherent ecosystem grew from a sense of self-created solidarity as the non-entertainment-industry. There was a self-made power in learning how to make films and video art around the challenges of scarcity that could never quite stabilize or resolve the problems of money, public indifference, and fragile organizational structures.
Rather than going deeper into technical crafts, I moved into directing and producing independent films while teaching and leading a media arts organization. I was developing collaborative relationships both in my own projects and in my professional work. When the physical solidity of handling celluloid film and tape disappeared in everyday digital workflows, I focused on finding communities to work and interact with.
The power I’d felt in the past from mastering the tools of production that I could hold against my body and handle physically once again shifted. Now, I had to face the fact that agency would come from learning to experiment with the ephemera of the internet, let it all vanish as the next technology came along to change everything once again.
Lost in the virtual, I floated in a sea of everything available all the time. In the past it had been tough to get our hands on media making tools. The cost and constraints were daunting but useful for artists. Loading heavy gear and hoping it’d work in the field, wrestling with cassettes and dubs of tapes, trading work with tech guys to help fix issues - the effort made for deeper meaning and community ties.
Now I needed a different relationship to digital overflow, one that could hold that deeper meaning when all creative experiences seemed disposable and impermanent. The new territory required a new kind of creative discipline and conviction.
Questions nagged me that I didn’t know how to resolve. I wasn’t satisfied with solutions that aimed to restore a bygone era. Did audiences need another gorgeously crafted, streaming-ready, heroic character study by an indie documentary auteur? How could I sustain a creative practice that made sense to me balancing a relationship with the digital ecosystem that seemed to determine what we could make and how we could make it?
All the film business solutions out there avoided addressing independent media as an art form instead of a commercial product. Where were the writers and critics looking at new documentary explorations as portals to such a wide range of subjective experiences that expressed life in this moment?
A clarifying moment occurred for me and my creative collaborator, Patricia Zimmermann, when we attended a documentary conference session. In a classroom down the street from the main events, several artists were presenting their new digital media works that stretched far beyond the classic notions of documentary. What we saw and discussed didn’t fit into traditional categories. We were among a handful of people at this session, and the implications of these projects blew our minds. We had to think about them together.
In a café around the corner, we sat down and came up with a list of categories to think about and give visibility to these new digital, hybrid projects. Over the next several years, from articles to presentations, we developed the open space new media framework for non-fiction and experimental, transmedia works that provoked different questions. We were interested in projects that didn’t fit either commercial entertainment models or the prevalent auteurist model.
Open space new media, as a guiding principle, gathers media projects emerging in the digital space where makers of color, women, and marginalized international voices build community and share evolving dialogue around suppressed and unresolved issues.
As we write in our 2018 book, Open Space New Media Documentary:
Adaptability, community, flexibility, and risk-taking characterize this open space movement toward more fluid transmedia practice…Open space documentary projects elicit new feelings, ideas, sensations, and thoughts in community gatherings and designed dialogues. They ignite new thinking and propel action.
This framework, developed over years of conversation, observation, and study, gave me language for what I was already discovering in practice but couldn’t quite name. It became less about changing how I made films and more about changing how I approached the uncertainty of making them. My role wasn't to impose meaning but to create conditions where meaning could emerge in different ways and in different times as the project developed from an idea to its own life out in the world.
I learned that I'd moved from a tool and craft focus to practicing relational mastery -- the ability to create metaphorical containers where meaningful film work happens collaboratively. Making this kind of film has been a continual exercise in uncertainty, being surprised, trusting the process, and tolerating financial anxiety around production costs in people and technology time.
When leading a project, I noticed my deepening awareness of being a co-creator rather than auteur. While shooting, I listened to people in front of and behind the camera in ways that changed my expectations daily. Instead of fighting the inevitable unknowns and disappointments, when I focus on solving small problems and responding to mysterious possibilities, collective energy takes over.
I’ve practiced the Open Space principles in the field and in the editing room. I've learned from experience to work with the creative tension between individual ambition to express what's needed to complete a project, and the communal engagement that makes documentary a living, evolving composition refracting life as it is lived now.
This localized, human-scaled path is neither clear nor simple. The stance of relational mastery is about sustaining the curiosity to try, to feel when it is working, and to change course when it isn’t.
I love technique. What I’m learning from the 2025 media world is how to dig in and work with massive, systemic constraints, and turn to real people, real places and real service as constants that streaming culture obliterates.
Over the decades my organizing principles have changed. Noticing those old tools under the worktable forces a hard truth: creative change is constant and never still. I once valued a solo, experimental practice. Now I can't imagine working except as an individual in community, opening to recombination and pulling together all that this era of digital abundance and creative chaos offers in a great tangle of truthfulness.
If you're in the East Bay Area I'll be screening our new film, Between the Sun and the Sidewalk at The Cerrito Theater in El Cerrito on September 18. It’s part of the "Courage, Hope, Resistance" documentary series programmed by the Albany Film Festival and the Berkeley Film Foundation. I’ll be leading an audience conversation after the screening delving into the urgent themes that the story tackles.
In upcoming posts, I'll explore these ideas further and dig into the practical side of this approach through what we call "The Ten C's" - specific ways to work with collaborative emergence in media projects. You can find more about the Open Space New Media framework in Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice, which I co-authored with Patricia Zimmermann.