Five Questions With Stephen Wichuk

We often take the winding path to our careers and that’s no different for Stephen Wichuk, Manager of Service Experience. He tells us how he relished his early roles in animation and sound design before moving into ITS, where he applies a more critical approach to the technology we use every day at ECU.

What do you like most about your role within ECU or the community?

I like my current role because I get to work with so many people. It feels more academic after a few years of being in the technical weeds of IT, which is not my background to begin with. My background is actually in animation. I transferred to Emily Carr's Animation program from the U of A (whose Clement Greenberg-obsessed faculty had scared me away). I started working here almost immediately after graduating and stayed with the animation department for a decade. I'd always worked closely with the late Jean-Paul Faubert and acted in his position when I got pulled into IT - first as a Windows system administrator, then the devices lead and now as Service Experience manager.

I was never really interested in doing the film industry thing. Still, I had a good run of fun, odd jobs in the middle, like doing construction for TV actor Erik Breker, teaching kids animation, working at movie theatres, creating short music videos for Veda Hille's Return of the Kildeer album and creating the theme song for a Cartoon Network show called The Woodsmen. I was even an extra in a scene with Queen Latifah in Scary Movie 3 until they cut my scene! These gave me the flexibility to focus on my artwork, curatorial projects like Hymn Video Magazine and my social practice of teaching 16mm film animation processes for free to anyone who would listen!

What’s something that you wish maybe people understood a bit more about IT that fascinates you?

IT has so much to do with psychology and human behaviour, and for it to work well, you need those soft skills to understand human inclinations and interactions. That's true for cybersecurity, user experience and navigation, or people's attitudes towards new tools. I'm definitely becoming more sensitive to those aspects and learning a lot from the people I work with. In my own graduate research, I had a pretty critical view. I was looking at artists like Harun Farocki, who were grappling with the military and surveillance origins of media technology.

What’s one unexpected thing that people might not know about you?

I'm a bit of a physics nerd. I can't pretend to understand the math, but I find the questions and implications of quantum and relativistic physics fascinating. Quantum computers are right around the corner, but we are also living in a golden age of astrophysics. With the James Webb telescope, the LIGO gravitational wave detector and now the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE) slated to be developed off the BC coast, we're peering back to the beginning of time.

What two pieces of pop culture of any medium would you bring to a desert island?

I am a huge sci-fi fan, and my wife recently introduced me to the British comedy Red Dwarf. Not only is it constantly hilarious and prodigiously long-running (1988-2009, so - lots of episodes!), it's also perfectly suited to a lonesome desert island stay. The protagonist, Dave Lister, wakes up three million years into the future, finding himself the last living human being alongside a cast of robots, aliens, holographic ghosts and a hyper-evolved cat. Lister struggles to find amusement and meaning at the end of history.

If you could invite three fictional characters to a dinner party, who would they be and why?

In the real world, I'd never fan conflict, but if we're inviting fictional characters, it's worth drawing out a performance. The Baron Munchausen is due for a GPT-enabled reboot and could regale us with some patrician nonsense. Meanwhile, Daria will cut through each tale with her quick-witted, passive-aggressive jabs. Lastly, we'll need a real party person and some physical comedy in the shape of Patsy Stone from Absolutely Fabulous.