Enthusiastic, articulate and telegenic, Chelfyn and Helen Baxter advocate the high-tech DIY lifestyle.
Helen and Chelfyn Baxter are among the prophets of our digital future. As the contributors to Digital Life on Radio New Zealand National, they introduce us to concepts that have just, or just about, become reality – printers that make 3D objects, travel guides to virtual worlds, a sculpture of Rodin’s The Thinker the size of two red blood cells.
A recent episode discussed robot-built houses, a prototype of which will be tested at the University of Southern California in April. “We’ll finally get away from right-angles, we’ll be able to build curves easily,” says Chelfyn. “People will be able to design their own houses on the desktop, run it by an architect to make sure it’s not going to fall down, and then print it.” Helen points out that resistance from the building industry and governments may delay the spread of the technology.
The robot house is the kind of news story that appeals to them: an example of high-tech DIY that fits in with how they live and how they predict many of us may live soon – using increasingly sophisticated tools to construct bespoke lifestyles.
From their house in Waitakere City, they run TMet Recordings, a dance-music label that began releasing digital downloads back in 2003; and Mohawk Media, the title under which they make 3D animation and special effects.
Naturally, they also maintain a number of blogs. Helen has just become a strategist for the Big Idea, a website for New Zealand’s arts community. Chelfyn has been teaching himself magic, and is on YouTube performing a beer-can trick to K Rd clubbers. Their next project is an internet TV show, which they’re making in their back-room studio. Chelfyn is suffering a bout of occupational overuse syndrome, which they both get periodically, so he is modifying the studio’s keyboards to eliminate uncomfortable movements.
A few weeks ago, they told me of their latest exciting discovery – a scientist who stores information in a single light photon. “When new technologies are announced, a lot of people go, ‘It’s too good to be true,’” says Chelfyn. “When you’ve seen enough of these things, you can tell the difference between stories that should be ignored until they’re proven and those that stand a good chance of taking off.”
“Futurists are like economists and astrologers,” says Helen. “People believe you even if you get it wrong.”
They are a double act. Both enthusiastic, articulate and telegenic. Helen is four years younger, and sunnier, while Chelfyn is more didactic. He makes the products; she runs the business. Otherwise, they are very alike, in ways that make more sense in light of their upbringings, which are also peculiarly similar.
Born in New Zealand 33 years ago, Helen was adopted by a Welsh couple and taken, at the age of six weeks, to live in Hereford, on the England-Wales border. She won a place at the 600-year-old Hereford Cathedral School, where minor aristocracy and diplomats’ children are groomed for leadership. She left home at 16, but stayed at school and ran the snack bar. She didn’t go to university; she moved to Bristol and fell in with the dance scene. Over the next 10 years she worked for a magazine, joined the WOMAD crew, became a stage manager for the Glastonbury Festival.
In 1993 she discovered the internet – “I was in heaven! … I remember my head just vibrating with what we could do with it.” The next year she started making organic herbal highs, selling them online, and later began running internet training courses. Meanwhile, she danced in a techno band called MJ-12 and a dance troupe whose costumes, frequently alien-themed, were designed to glow under UV lights. This was how she met Chelfyn.
Chelfyn was also an adopted only child. He grew up as Kelvin Baxter, in a Newcastle mining village. Like Helen, he was a scholarship student. He went to the Royal Grammar School, but says his schoolfellows despised him and the children in his neighbourhood rejected him as stuck-up. He discovered computers at the age of eight, and immediately became obsessed. The next year he started programming Basic at university labs after school. When he was 14, his school advised his parents to sell his computer because his marks were dropping. He won’t elaborate on a hint that he was involved in some hacking pranks.
After one term studying physics at Durham University, he dropped out to play in bands. Making band posters sparked an interest in computer graphics, and he taught himself to make two- and three-dimensional images, which led to a job at a Bristol videographics company, creating globes and brains and morphing salmon for BBC natural history shows. At night he DJed, VJed and put on parties.
He and Helen got together in March 2001, six months before she was planning to come back to New Zealand. They married in June and emigrated from the UK in September, spending their first year here in a farmhouse in Maramarua, before Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey’s eco-city branding drew them to West Auckland.
Their confidence about a future of rapid technological change comes in part from their close involvement with developments in computing, but another aspect is their embrace of flexibility, which they believe started with their adoptions.
“When you’re adopted, you choose your path,” says Helen. “There’s no expectations or preconceptions.”
They’ve selected their careers, their homes, their names: Chelfyn made his eccentric spelling official six years ago and Helen sometimes operates under the title MsBehaviour. Their hair might be purple, orange, a mohawk, or absent.
But even as self-made characters, they’re still a product of their environment. Their venerable schools nurtured a distaste for hierarchy, further cultivated by the groups they mixed with in Bristol: the rockers, the hippies, the squatters, the ravers, all outside the bounds of early 90s British society.
They view with satisfaction the internet’s rout of traditional business models. Watching the recording industry’s losing battle against home studios, online distribution and file-sharing of songs, they predict gleefully that other sectors will soon follow, as the movie and television industries are doing already.
Chelfyn: “The supposed jobs threatened by the changes in the music industry – they aren’t real jobs, these people don’t do any good for music. It’s about selling plastic discs in plastic boxes.”
Other jobs will replace those lost to the net and other, newer technologies – sophisticated, creative, flexible jobs.
“The people who are going to thrive are the people who are adaptable,” Helen says. “It’s like the Wii [the Nintendo gaming device]. The Wii came out, they announced its specifications and within three days little companies had sprung up to support the Wii customers.”
This vision of small, co-operative businesses supporting personal manufacturing – the replacement of, say, the omnipresent Converse trainer with a shoe you design and make yourself – might be utopian. It is even, with its emphasis on raising the low and bringing down the strong (the Baxters are big on the internet’s potential for the poor and weak), revolutionary.
For flexibility, nothing beats capitalism, yet. Still, for those finding the present rate of change too fast, the approaching future may offer some relief. Chelfyn says, “Think how many jobs needn’t exist. Once you can house and feed yourself, and entertain yourself – if you choose the geek lifestyle you don’t need more.”
Digital Life, This Way Up, Radio New Zealand National, Saturday, 12.10pm.