Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dan Dowding. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Dan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

We quit our full time jobs to pursue video art full time!
At first it was an obsession for collecting vintage electronics and mainly analog CRT video art. We worked our fulltime jobs as a video editor and head of electronics recycling for several years. It was just a side quest that we obsessed over and spent every morsel of extra time we had digging deeper down the rabbit hole of video art. As our obsession grew, so did the opportunities to display our art. We started realizing that everyone young and old gravitated towards this “nostalgia”. All of a sudden my friend calls me and tells us “David Hasselhoff wants to shoot a music video in front of your TV Wall.” Before you know it the Hoff is belting out his single “Open Your Eyes” in my live/work studio. We’re flying to Miami to work with Bad Bunny. Eminem wants us to make an installation for a museum in Detroit. Then the pandemic hit and everything stopped, but we didn’t. We kept making art for ourselves. We developed our website. We were lucky to pivot out of the pandemic successfully. All the investments we made into our hobby and obsession during the pandemic paid off tenfold. It still feels like we’ve captured lighting in a bottle or rather electricity in a tube. We’ve been at this full steam since 2017 and now we are a team of 10 with a mission to bring artists’ and brands visual identity to life by combining vintage and modern technology.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Dan Dowding and I am the founder and president of Media Pollution. A video art collective that aims to BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER USING VIDEO, SCULPTURE, TECHNOLOGY, DISPLAYS, LIGHT and SOUND.

After distinguishing myself as the A/V kid in high school, I went to SCAD and got a BFA in TV and Film in 2008. I came to LA immediately to make movies and chase the Hollywood dream. In 2011, you couldn’t turn a corner in LA without spotting a CRT abandoned on the curbside. I was dubbing tapes deck to deck at Roundabout Entertainment and started amassing this collection of CRTs. “I’m going to make a movie that you have to watch across a wall of televisions I imagined to myself. “ Then I was swallowed whole and swooned by the concept of video art. I became obsessed and started collecting as many CRTs as possible. That was only the beginning

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

After filling my garage with 50+ CRTs I figured I better get a studio space if I am gonna make this TV Wall happen. So i did at Big Art Studios on Naud St. in Downtown Los Angeles. Literally the first day I moved in I was chatting with all the artists about this grand vision. Matt Wilson, an amazing fabricator, says “I gotta introduce you to this guy down the block” and literally marched me down the street and introduced me to Brian Fox. Brian was recycling electronics on the same block. I told him what I wanted to do and he was like “I’ll send you CRTs.” The next day a semi-truck pulls up and drops off 12 pallets of CRT Televisions. I built the wall at Naud with Matty. It was 20×20′ feet tall. After that Brian and I connected on a Music Festival at the Historic State Park and we’ve been business partners ever since. We still work with Matty to this day.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

We built a reputation by doing the projects we thought were most interesting and driving towards that. Everyone really responded to what we were doing and it was so encouraging. We connecting with our community of video artists around the world project by project. Any money we made we put back into what we were doing buying more TVs and electronics or software and resources. It was never about creating a business, it was always about making something cool, creating an experience of old and new. Combining digital and analog technologies which hadn’t been done until recently. I also like to think that we are just nice fun people and I think that goes along way. I always tell myself every interaction can lead to a live long relationship and I try not to loose sight of that.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mediapollution.tv
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mediapollution
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mediapollution
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mediapollution