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[Nettime-ro] FW: <nettime> DEFINING MULTIMEDIA (3/4) |
Ken Jordan DEFINING MULTIMEDIA (3 of 4) [Note: This is part 3 of a paper-in-progress that grew out of my collaboration with Randall Packer, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (W.W. Norton, 2001, and on ArtMusuem.Net). Part 1 proposed a definition of digital multimedia based on five core characteristics. Part 2 compared our definition to the one proposed in Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media. Part 4 will be posted soon. Comments are welcome.] 3. The Modernist Thread For the purpose of our project, Randall and I felt that the term "digital multimedia" seemed to be the most appropriate -- rather than "new media," "digital media," etc. -- because it emphasizes the form's continuity with efforts in the arts that came before. The word "multimedia" was coined by artists in the 1960s to describe avant-garde practices that not only mix diverse media, but also emphasize audience participation, non-linear narrative structures, and indeterminacy. There is a line in the development of computer-based media that runs parallel to an important trajectory in modernism. We want to make that connection explicit. This is not to say that digital multimedia grew out of a cohesive, carefully coordinated strategy. But looking back, you can identify a few consistent themes that drove the medium's development over a half century. These themes were pursued concurrently with other, at times conflicting, objectives. But in retrospect the extent of a consistent vision shared by the scientists and artists who pioneered multimedia is quite profound -- as is the mutual influence between science and art (with conceptual and technological breakthroughs feeding one another) that led to the computer-based media we know today. Eventually these diverse efforts coalesced into a meta-medium, to borrow a phrase from Alan Kay. [1] Kay is the man who tied the loose threads of digital multimedia together in the late 1960s, by designing the prototype for the first true multimedia computer, the Dynabook. Vannevar Bush began it all by proposing a mechanical device that operated literally "as we may think." [2] The challenge, as he discussed it in his famous article of 1945, was to create a machine that supported the mind's process of free association in the act of creation. This aspect of Bush's hypothetical machine, which he dubbed the memex, tends to get overlooked today. What gets attention instead are the many ways the memex foreshadows the personal computer -- particularly its ability to call up media objects from a database. Bush did not use the word "database," because the memex, as he described it, was not a digital device. It was analog: a desktop and storage space that gave access to microfilm, audio recordings, photographs, and movies. It was, in a way, a kind of library -- but with a crucial difference. Libraries arrange information linearly. Bush, however, was interested in rearranging information according to the idiosyncratic paths of personal association that each individual invents during the creative process. He wanted a machine that encouraged spontaneous, associative, stream-of-consciousness thinking, and then left a trail of that thought process behind so that it could be retrieved, not only by the individual who created it, but by others as well. In this way, the memex would allow people to share their private, unconsidered thoughts as they leap between ideas moment by moment. Bush was interested in identifying a central aspect of consciousness, and making a device that effectively expanded consciousness through mechanical means. If you look at the history of the personal computer from this perspective -- as an ongoing project to create a media machine that enhances the intuitive, associative tendencies of consciousness -- it connects digital media inextricably to important currents that run through modernism. Bush had taken, essentially, an esthetic position -- an esthetic position that shares remarkable qualities with some unexpected bedfellows. These are contemporaries with whom Bush is never associated, particularly as he was FDR's chief science advisor and the architect of the military industrial complex. Still, as the person who proposed that information should be organized and saved mechanically in a way that captures the spontaneous movement of the mind, it is inevitable that he should be linked to others who shared similar interests in mid-century. For example, during the 1940s Charlie Parker was pioneering a new musical vocabulary based on spontaneous improvisation -- one that went far beyond the method established by Louis Armstrong. Parker's radical approach to improvisation, the charts be damned, placed non-linear associative thinking above all else in jazz, and led to the free jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and others in the 1960s and 70s. In painting, Jackson Pollock was taking a similar approach at the time, dripping paint in loops following the dictates of his spirit, never following a plan or a sketch. The privileging of spontaneous action was central to Pollock's practice. In literature, during these same years, Jack Kerouac pursued a method of "spontaneous bop prosody" -- as he called it -- that led him to write novels that captured the movement of his mind moment-by-moment in the act of creation; a steady stream of honest personal observation that used associative thinking as its central organizing principle. The prim bureaucrat Vannevar Bush might have been surprised to find himself in such unkempt, but august, company. However, looking back the similarities between Bush and the mid-century American avant-garde are obvious. They shared an esthetic that treats the individual's private impulse as primary, and that gives people permission to act in a non-linear, irrational way, as society would define it. Bush's interest was to enable each of us to shape data into the form that serves us best, rather than to conform our private thought process to an organization set by others. This opposition between self and society is not absolute, of course (though in mid-century the tension between private impulse and social conformity was an intellectual flash point, especially because of the threats of Fascism and Stalinism, on the one hand, and the theories of Freud, on the other). That digital media can trace its birth to the intent to mine this opposition, however, is significant. Bush's vision inspired a generation of computer pioneers in the 1960s, and led directly to the personal computer. Douglas Engelbart, for one, was famously inspired by "As We May Think," and dedicated himself to building a working model of Bush's association machine -- this during the same years that Coltrane, Pollock, and Kerouac (not to mention their many cohorts, and the legions of young artists they inspired) had broken through to the mainstream. The assumption that "great art" was made through the formal arrangement of spontaneous impulses was not only the mantra of cultural bohemians; it was a notion hotly debated in the popular press. The birth of the personal computer belongs to this moment. Engelbart expanded on Bush's premise by designing an oNLine System that would "augment human intellect," as he put it, [3] based on the insight that the open flow of ideas and information (as represented by texts and pictures) between collaborators was as important to creativity as private free association. At the same time, J.C.R. Licklider envisioned universal networked access to the full "library" of human knowledge. This idea led him to spearhead the early development of the Internet while he ran a research program for the Defense Department, ARPA. Soon after, Ted Nelson followed with a proposal for a "hypermedia" system (he coined the term) that would fulfill Bush's objective to arrange materials from this "library" in a manner that reflects how the mind moves freely from one thought to another. [4] Central to all these efforts was the notion that the user should not only have access to media objects, so she can organize them as she pleases, but that the computer user should also be able to interact with media objects, and change them to suit the needs of the moment. Editing and recombining digital media was seen as essential to the utility of the computer. Licklider, in his seminal article "Man-Computer Symbiosis," [5] proposed that the computer should act as an extension of the human capabilities for cognition and communication -- which includes, of course, the manipulation of media. Engelbart's oNLine System was designed specifically for the collaborative manipulation of digital media over a wired network. In keeping with Bush's vision of the memex as a way to enhance creativity, these pioneers insisted that the computer user's ability to interact with and change media should be as great as possible. Tim Berners-Lee has often said that he considered the edit function in the first Web browser to be just as important as the ability to link between Web pages; for the Web to be successful, he felt it essential that each reader could also be an author, able to annotate Web pages by adding "private links." [6] This approach to interactivity paralleled currents in the avant-garde, particularly in performance. In 1948, John Cage introduced the idea of live performance as unscripted event, in which the audience encounters people, objects, and activities within a defined space, in surprising juxtaposition to one another. The audience is encouraged to become creative participants in the work of art as it occurs. [7] This type of performance, which Allan Kaprow later named Happenings [8], shared many concerns with the way engineers were shaping online interactive environments. Both engineers and artists were addressing the question: how do you encourage the appropriate dynamic encounter between people within a framed situation? And they reached a similar conclusion: give the user/participant as much freedom to act as possible. Implicit in Bush's memex is the suggestion that a mechanical device can replicate the intimate movement of the mind at play, by representing media objects of all kinds in any order, as the user desires. From this, it follows that a computer might one day effectively mimic the encounter of consciousness with the world through the senses, by arranging media objects in a way that mimics reality. Though Bush himself did not make this leap, engineers influenced by his vision in the early 1960s did, and none more profoundly than Ivan Sutherland. Sutherland was the first person to propose that bits and bytes could be represented as three-dimensional virtual environments. In his article from 1965, "The Ultimate Display," [9] he began with the idea that by digitizing information -- transforming it into ones and zeros -- all data became subject to the graceful manipulations made possible by mathematics. This, in turn, invites the computer programmer to shape data into a three-dimensional form that mimics the way we encounter information in the physical world. Like Bush, Sutherland's approach to the formal arrangement of information is essentially an esthetic stance. This particular esthetic stance can be traced back to the mid-19th century writings of Richard Wagner, which declared that art should do its best to recreate the full, multi-sensory engagement between the self and the world. To facilitate his vision, Wagner reinvented the conventions of the opera house, and in 1876 opened the Festpielhaus Theater in Bayreuth, Germany. It was the first modern theater to employ Greek amphitheatrical seating, surround-sound accoustics, the darkening of the house, and the placement of musicians in an orchestra pit -- all to focus the audience's attention on the dramatic action, and transport them into an illusionary world staged within the proscenium arch. Wagner's call for an immersive "collective artwork" that fuses all the arts into a single expression [10] -- his "Gesamtkunstwerk" -- is echoed in the last paragraph of Sutherland's 1965 paper: "The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal. With appropriate programming such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked." [11] Sutherland presented this paper at an engineering conference, and it was first published in a technical journal. But it is hard to ignore how much it reads like a manifesto written by an Italian Futurist. There is, in fact, a remarkable similarity between the tone and intention of articles by certain computer media engineers and fiery artistic manifestos. The modernist imperative to "make it new" (in Pound's famous phrase), and the belief that society will be transformed as a result, is very much present in writing by computer scientists. Digital multimedia may well force us to reconsider the entire historic arc of modernism, including its supposed end, since the esthetic stance of modernism has become increasingly relevant in response to digital media. When Alan Kay designed the prototype for the Dynabook, in the late 1960s, the intellectual foundation was in place for a digital multimedia that synthesized all existing art forms, and presented them in an environment that enabled meaningful interactivity and hyperlinks. With the requisite processing power, it would eventually incorporate Sutherland's experiments with three dimensional representations. This meta-medium, to use Kay's term, carried with it specific, idealistic attitudes and intentions about human creativity and communications. It reflected a commitment to media forms that are nonhierarchical, open, collaborative, and emulate the free movement of the mind at play. It is, in sum, an extraordinary vision. ----- Notes: [1] Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, "Personal Dynamic Media," in Multimedia: >From Wagner to Virtual Reality, Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, eds. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 167 [2] Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think," ibid, p. 135 [3] Douglas Engelbart, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework," ibid, p. 64 [4] Ted Nelson, "excerpt from Computer Lib/Dream Machines," ibid, p. 154 [5] J.C.R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis," ibid, p. 55 [6] Tim Berners-Lee, "Information Management: A Proposal," ibid, p. 189 [7] John Cage, "Diary: Audience 1966," ibid, p. 91 [8] Allan Kaprow, "Untitled Guidelines for Happenings," ibid, p. 279 [9] Ivan Sutherland, "The Ultimate Display," ibid, p. 232 [10] Richard Wagner, "Outlines of the Artwork of the Future," ibid, p. 3 [11] Ivan Sutherland, ibid, p. 236 ------------ Ken Jordan ken@kenjordan.tv 212-741-6173 "Be as if." - Andrew Boyd # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net _______________________________________________ Nettime-ro mailing list Nettime-ro@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-ro --> arhiva: http://amsterdam.nettime.org/