Tim McLaughlin

I may be writing this too soon, given that I only learned of
Tim's death yesterday, and I've not had much of a chance to
process it.  It's hit me rather harder than I would have
expected.  I liked Tim a great deal, but it would be a
stretch to call us friends. "Casual acquaintances" would I
think be closer to the mark, and most of that was three
decades ago.

I met Tim in the fall of 1993.  It was a transitional moment
in my life and not a particularly happy time.  The MFA in
painting had predictably led nowhere and my girlfriend had
left to go to grad school in London (from whence she would
never return, although I didn't know that yet).  I was,
essentially, spinning my wheels for a year while I figured
out my next move.  Meanwhile I needed a job, and eventually
found one at Duthie Books on Robson St (downtown Vancouver,
for those of you who aren't from around here). Which is
where I met Tim, who was working there too.

Superficially, our circumstances weren't all that
dissimilar.  Tim too had just finished a Masters degree in a
relatively impractical discipline (Philosophy of Science),
had artistic tendencies, and was between one thing and
another. But the similarities ended there: unlike me in
those days, Tim seemed to live a charmed life. "Tim always
lands with his bum in the butter" was how our mutual friend
and Duthie's colleague Kate once put it.

Everyone liked Tim; he had a kind of natural unforced charm
that drew people to him.  He was intelligent, he was kind,
and he had great hair.  And while my artistic 'career' was
spluttering out on the launchpad, his was just lifting off.
In contrast to my antediluvian dream of becoming a painter,
Tim was a self-described "hypertext poet."  It's probably
not possible now to convey how cool that sounded in 1993.
But to give you some idea, that was the first time I'd heard
the word "hypertext", and it was big news to me that
something so self-evidently geeky could somehow be conjoined
with poetry.  (I think Tim was also the person who first
explained to me how email worked. Yes, I spent the 1980s
under a rock.)

I left Duthie's in the summer of '94 to go travelling for a
month, and then went back to grad school, this time in
library studies.  But from time to time I continued to hang
with some of the folks I'd met at the bookstore and so
followed Tim's career through a series of launch parties,
openings, and just regular parties.  Tim's hypertext novel
"Notes Toward Absolute Zero" was published by Eastgate press
in 1995; around the same time he'd hooked up with a
hypertext art collective called Knossopolis and published
work in their web zine NWHQ, funded by the Canada Council;
his collaborative work 'Assemblage' was exhibited at one of
the Venice Biennales in the mid-1990s; later on he did a
stint at the Banff Centre developing a collection of
hypertext poems, and so on.

I had lost touch with him by the late 1990s. I heard he'd
married, had a child, and moved to the Sunshine Coast, where
he continued to pursue his art, with some web design work on
the side.

I saw him only once after that.  In March 2019 I arranged
for him to visit the University of Victoria for one of a
series of events we hosted to highlight the precariousness
of digital data.  The great scholar, historian, author and
preserver of hypertext literature, Dene Grigar, conducted a
"traversal" of "Notes Toward Absolute Zero" - essentially a
documentary recording for posterity of the artist navigating
his own hypertext work, followed by a Q&A session.  I am so
very glad we did that, all the more so in light of
yesterday's news.  It was a memorable day.

In trying to sum up my thoughts about Tim, there is probably
no better way than to say "he was someone I wanted to be
more like."  At a transitional point in my life, Tim
provided me with an inspiring example of what that
transition might look like.  While I never did follow his
path into new media art, opting instead for the somewhat
divergent path of "new media librarian", Tim nevertheless
deserves some credit for showing me the way forward.  I am
very glad I knew him, and deeply sorry he is gone.


Postscript:

Hypertext literature was big during the 1990s, but by the
early 2000s it was no longer seen as cutting-edge and the
Canada Council grants and other meagre institutional
supports for new media art were by then underwriting various
newer forms of it.  Rather than follow the trends, Tim
turned his attention instead to an eclectic range of more
traditional media like photography, bookworks, and mixing
textile dyes.  It wouldn't surprise me if that had a
somewhat marginalizing effect on his artistic career, but if
so I expect it didn't bother him that much.


Tim on the web:

https://tmcl.ca/

https://www.eastgate.com/people/McLaughlin.html

http://www.box19.ca/tmcl/Blueprints/index.html

http://www.box19.ca/tmcl/deep_web/index.html

http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/elab.html

https://scalar.usc.edu/works/rebooting-electronic-literature
-volume-2/traversal-of-tim-mclaughlins-notes-toward-absolute-zero


Sun May 26 15:50:57 PDT 2024