From 1991 – 1994 I spent two days a week teaching children visiting the hospital how to make their own videos. It needs to be said that these were the days when cameras weren’t in everyone’s pocket and there was no internet and social media to broadcast your movies to the world.
So the concept of CHTV – Children’s Hospital Television — was pretty radical. The idea was to teach the children how to make their own television programs and broadcast them on the hospital’s closed-circuit television system. While cameras were rare, tv sets were everywhere – in waiting rooms, lounges, cafeteria, in treatment rooms and over every child’s bed.
At its heart, it was a blast. I had outfitted a gurney with camera equipment, and edit system, a 13 inch color monitor, and an Amiga computer with video interface to do animations and very primitive special effects. When I rolled into a lounge or the dialysis room, the kids lit up. I’ve never felt so appreciated.
But beyond the pure joy, I believed that by empowering the hospitalized children with the tools to express themselves through the medium of television, it transforms their relationship to media from passive consumer to active maker. That transformed perception about media, also transformed their relationship to the hospital, the doctors and nurses, and to their very own health and well-being.
And I saw miracles. I visited a clinically depressed adolescent who had broken his hip because he had brittle bones from all his chemo. He made a haunting animation of himself looking at his mirror image as a skeleton. Morbid? But he was engrossed for an hour and immediately after asked to eat. He hadn’t eaten in a week.
In a workshop in the trauma rehab wing, we circled around to learn how to interview. We passed the microphone around taking turns asking the child next to us a question. When one girl was presented with the microphone and question, she answered then asked a question of the next child. I saw a woman in the back of the room weeping. At the end of the workshop, she came over to that girl, who was her daughter. I asked if she was all right and the mother replied that this was the first time she had spoken in three months. That girl became one of our star interviewers.
There was of course the sad side. Some of the children whom I got to know well because they were in the hospital for a long time, died. And some children were there because of violence at home.
I have made many films for television since the days of CHTV. I’m proud of every film I’ve made. But if one could quantify the value created in the lives in the millions of people who have watched them and compare that energy with what happened in the lives of those hundreds of children and myself in those three years at Children’s Hospital, the spirit of CHTV totally tips the scale.
I was honored to work with other artists-in-residence whose work brought beauty and creative energy to the children – painter/artist Barbara Carrasco, and writer/poets Roberto Bedoya and Richard Garcia.
Gary Glassman