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Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality
Those traits aren't accidental, the authors say. They were the product of belief and deliberate intent on the part of multimedia's pioneers, who had very specific goals, many of them outlined in this collection. In fact, this is perhaps the best collection yet assembled on the early writings about multimedia, its aesthetics, visions, social impact and astounding potential on the emerging creative relationship between technology -- especially computing -- and human beings.
Packer teaches in the Department of Digital Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Ken Jordan is a pioneer in Web-based media, the founding editorial director of SonicNet.com and co-founder of the public-interest portal MediaChannel.org.
If you're not certain what multimedia really is or whence it came, Packer and Jordan assembled the best guide yet on a subject of central importance to anyone interested in the future of media, and the growing marriage between art and science. Some of these ideas are grounded in new thinking and research, some go back hundreds of years. The collection is historically significant, given that nobody has ever woven together the different threads, thoughts and impulses that become multimedia, a new form both of media and culture.
Packer and Jordan define the key characteristics intrinsic to computer-based multimedia as integration, interactivity, immersion, hypermedia, and narrativity.
Integration, by their definition, is the combining of artistic forms and technology into a hybrid expression. Interactivity: the ability of the user to manipulate and affect her experience of media directly, and, through media, to communicate with others.
Hypermedia, say Packer and Jordan, is the linking of separate media elements to create a trail of personal association. Immersion is "the experience of entering into the simulation or suggestion of a three-dimensional environment," and narrativity means "aesthetic strategies that derive from the above concepts, which result in nonlinear story forms and media presentation." (Blair Witch Project, for a lite example, or the book A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius, by Dave Eggers).
"With the Dynabook in the early l970's," write Packer and Jordan, "Alan Kay invented a machine that incorporated all five of these characteristics for the first time, giving birth to digital multimedia."
But it is immersion which gives the Net and the Web their most radical impact on creativity, story-telling and presentation, and education.
In "Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art (l991)," which is reprinted in this book, George Landow and Paul Delany write: "Hypertext...changes our sense of authorship, authorial property, and creativity (or originality) by moving away from the constructions of page-bound technology. In so doing, it promises to have an effect on cultural and intellectual disciplines as important as those produced by earlier shifts in the technology of cultural memory that followed the invention of writing and printing."
Although few people in the off-line world yet take it seriously, Landow and Delany foresaw the revolutionary changes in narrative, story-telling, messaging, culture (like gaming) and art that are one of the most significant characteristics of recent Net history.
Almost everyone reading this has a personal or business stake in multi-media, whether he or she knows it or not. Younger Americans are raised in interactive media environments, and it isn't that big of a stretch to say multimedia is one of the most significant influences in their thinking and learning.
Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality explains how what we call multimedia came about and presents its generally untold and unappreciated history. Specifically, the book sets out in five clear and well-organized parts to explain how the interfaces, links and interactivity that are taken for granted grew out of a series of collaborations between the arts and sciences going all the way back to composer Richard Wagner, whose ideas about the immersive nature of musical theater in many ways foreshadowed the notion of virtual reality. The book flows skillfully from one idea to the next, each section building on the one that preceded it.
The authors have gathered seminal -- often unknown -- writings on the multimedia age: the Futurists' 1916 manifesto on cinema, which suggested that the new medium would unite all media and replace the book; Vannevar Bush's famous 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay that sparked the idea of hyperlinks; J.C.R. Licklider's influential l960 argument that people and computers could one day collaborate in creative work; Nam June Paik's essay proposing that satellite technology might encourage a new kind of global information art; Tim Berners-Lee's l989 proposal for the document-sharing network that became the Web; Pavel Curtis's writings on MUD's and MUDDing.
Although the tech world is usually too busy to dwell much on history, it's interesting to be reminded again that no idea is really new, and to grasp some of the fundamental principles behind multimedia, an idea whose time has definitely come, and with a bang.
You can purchase this book at FatBrain.
Its a fact, I'm more likely to click on a Flash Banner, or something that is animated, than on a flashing gif. Humans respond better to multimedia. TV is the perfect example. How many people still go home and watch the news or current affairs shows? They could get 100 times more information if they surfed the internet... Another example, have a look at how many Visulization plugins there are for Winamp... I know when I'm in the mood for music, the Laptop gets hooked upto the stereo, and the 80cm Television, and on goes G-Force :)
As someone responsible for working to develop multimedia technologies to the classroom and desktop throughout a large land grant university in the US, I take exception to this.
While certainly there have been many idiotic purchases that fit your description, these have almost always been forced on us by our state legislature. Bad deciscions are going to happen regardless of what sort of technology we are discussing. It is the job of you and I and others like us to see that good technology decisions are made. As an example of good use of multimedia technology in the classroom, we have a professor using videoconferencing (h.323), a multimedia technology, to have a joint class on Islamic Studies with the American University of Cairo, all for a one time cost of less than $5000 including A/V integration... Oh, and the students happen to love it too.
wake up and find out that you are the eyes of the world.
over the last half century, we have been inundated with non-interactive media broadcasts.
prior to this invasion there was no such thing as a non-interactive experience.
"Hypertext...changes our sense of authorship, authorial property, and creativity (or originality) by moving away from the constructions of page-bound technology."
;-)
I realise this is a quote from another source, but I'm don't think that's true. Just bcos I can navigate to anywhere I want in a website, it doesn't give me any feeling of ownership over the site. The old choose-your-own adventure books in the 80s were fun, but you always knew Steve Jackson or whoever had written them. And real creativity isn't possible in a multiple-choice environment (eg. the options of "open the door boldly and fight/open the door carefully and backstab" don't cover the third option of "get some drapes from the last room, soak them in the pool of oil in the room before that, and burn the buggers out").
Nor does linking change anything. Essentially, all linking does is tell your readers how to find source material or related information - it doesn't mean, for instance, that 2600 actually owns DeCSS (a point on which the US legislature need to get a clue).
Authorship and authorial property are another point. There's a long history of breaking copyright by copying music for your friends - hell, that's the only reason to have a twin-deck tape player! We always knew it was technically wrong, but we did it anyway bcos we couldn't afford to buy as much music as we wanted - and the same goes for copying computer games on tape. Napster and co have just made it easier to break copyright law. But there's still no argument over the author of the music - regardless of who you pirated it off on Napster/Gnutella, you still know that the music was written by Metallica or whoever.
The more I see articles about "the Web changes everything", the more I realise that the article-writers (and book writers in this case) need a clue. Certainly it's changed things, but it's only changed them in the way that it's made existing interactions (passing information, copying music onto tapes for your friends, getting pr0n, etc) easier and/or more convenient than before. The telephone made it easier to interact with people on the other side of the country (or the other side of the world), but people still managed to communicate before it came along. "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
Grab.
PS. Yes I do know the original French, but many Americans probably don't!
"Multimedia": Use of more than one medium in a presentation or work.
Done.
The rest is filler.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Many people believe that Wagner's comments about Jews were motivated more by political expediance than by actual feelings of anti-semitism, but Wagner's fascist views were genuine, and a driving force behind most of his art. (Lohengren is about a woman who marries for her country... The Ring Cycle glorifies the pagan myths of northern Europe... You get the idea.)
It was not until the late 1990's that any orchestra in the entire nation of Israel publicly performed one of Wagner's works. IIRC correctly, it happened once, and has not been done again since.
Getting back to the Katz column, and the book he talks about, it seems to me that it is a silly distiction to call Wagner "multimedia", when very little separated him from operatic composers before him, such as Verdi (or even going back to Mozart's time). The only thing that might make Wagner different from his contemporaries (where a discussion of "multimedia" is concerned) is that he was extremely specific about his instructions to the theater director on details such as sets and blocking.
Verdi wanted you to have an "immersive" experience at the opera, too... but he trusted other people involved in the production to handle some of the visual details (focussing his attention on the music), while Wagner designed entire theaters to ensure that his works would be seen the way the composer intended it.
Wagner might not be the inventor of multimedia, but every film-maker who insists on a "director's cut" release is following his traditions. :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I am the IT Manager for an first-tier higher education institution and I must say I have mixed feelings about the contributions of multimedia to the classroom. Oddly enough, it seems the backlash against using multimedia has come not from the professor, but from the students. The most rudamentary form of multimedia, Power Point, is often viewed as giving professors an excuse to not actually teach the material. We also have $25,000 multimedia classrooms that, even when they work properly, usually take more time getting everything set up than actually assisting anyone teach. I remember not too many years ago that the solution to education deficiences was "give them computers!" instead of "train better teachers!" At least in the educational environment, multimedia has had mixed results.
Well, one of goals of Wagners "multi-media" was to encourage in society what later came to be called "National Socialism", better known as Nazism. I find it rather odd to call basic traditional "art" which throughout history has always been "multimedia", at least until the modern era divided dance, theatre and music into seperate specialties, as inherintly democratic. It serves the purposes of the societies that create it. Very rarely, in history at least, democratic ones.
""open, democratic, nonhierarchical, fluid, varied, inclusive -- a slippery domain that evades the critic's grasp just on the verge of definition.""
Ouch, I haven't seen such gobbly-gook double-speak since the last time I actually read my credit card agreement.
I realize that multimedia is important, but do they really need confuse the issue by burying it under doublespeak and general nonsense. Any computer geek will tell you, multimedia using more than one medium to convey a message.
(these quotes you have are utterly amazing, guess this is where the credit card lawyers practice between updates to agreements)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.