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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.
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.