Waves, Particles and Beams

Exactly four decades ago, artist Douglas Coupland was a student at Vancouver’s (then) Emily Carr College of Art and Design. Above is the first exhibition Coupland ever produced. It was made of wood and latex paint, and was titled ‘Waves, Particles & Beams’.

In the early 1990s Coupland, who went on to become a well known novelist and nonfiction writer, began working at the newly created Wired magazine in San Francisco. In 1995 he published his third novel, ‘Microserfs,’ which explored young people working within the then embryonic worlds of Microsoft, Apple and Silicon Valley startup culture. In 2006 he published ‘jPod’ (which went on the become a TV series) which took place within the computer game development universe. In 2010 he published a widely acclaimed biography of seminal technology seer Marshall McLuhan, and in 2014, the nonfiction ‘Kitten Clone,’ an in-depth analysis of the global optical fibre industry, which was runner up for the Weston Writer’s Trust Award for Nonfiction.

Forty years later, here in the highly appropriate Telus Sky lobby, Coupland revisits hislife-long love of colour, geometric forms and the often wondrous (and not always horrible) sensations of human life lived alongside our ever-evolving new technologies. It is a temporary installation that shows us that any artist’s creative journey begins with seeds that are often planted very early in life.