Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality

by Ken Jordan, Randall Packer. New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company, 2001

One of the unsettling ironies of American culture at this moment in our history is the widespread sense that as technology grows more sophisticated, so too does our ambivalence toward its unintended consequences. The vigorous promotion of technological progress that characterized American society in the second half of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century has been replaced in recent decades by doubts about — and, in some quarters, outright hostility toward — the technologies that, we are told, undergird our prosperity and future happiness. Whether it's nuclear power and its attendant waste or the ethics of stem-cell research, bioengineered "Frankenfood" or the wasteland of five-hundred-channel cable systems, significant numbers of Americans have grown to distrust both the benefits and ends of many of our most dazzling technological achievements.

It is an attitude that is conspicuously absent from Randall Packer and Ken Jordan's Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, a collection of essays, articles, and literary artifacts that traces the development of multimedia over the past 150 years. To assemble the volume, Packer, a composer and media artist, and Jordan, the founding editorial director of SonicNet.com and co-founder of the public-interest portal MediaChannel.org, scoured the literary contributions of dozens of artists, scientists, musicians, and theorists whose "idealistic and ideological aspirations" helped lead, in their view, to the creation of "a new medium that emphasizes individual choice, free association, and personal expression." The result, as William Gibson, the influential author of Necromancer (1984), says in his Foreword, is "a collection of historic texts" in which "the bodies (or, rather, the bones of the ancestors) are buried."

Among the "bones" are seminal essays by the likes of Vannevar Bush ("As We May Think"), FDR's chief scientific adviser during World War II and the man credited with introducing many of the concepts central to hypermedia and personal computing; Norbert Wiener ("Cybernetics in History"), whose landmark treatise Cybernetics (1948) established the field of information science; and J.C.R. Licklider ("Man-Computer Symbiosis"), the director of the U.S. government's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) during the 1960s, a period in which it created the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet.

There are also dense, elegantly reasoned papers by a Who's Who of "geeks" (as Gibson affectionately calls them) — brilliant mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers like Douglas Engelbart ("Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework"), the inventor of the mouse, e-mail, and the word processor; Alan Kay ("User Interface: A Personal View"), the developer of the first graphical user interface (GUI); and Tim Berners-Lee ("Information Management: A Proposal"), the father of the World Wide Web. And there are more fanciful contributions from a range of "artboys" (Gibson's term again) — artists, writers, and musicians such as Richard Wagner, John Cage, William Burroughs, and Nam June Paik who were (or are) committed, as Packer and Jordan write, "to forms of media and communications that are nonhierarchical, open, collaborative, and reflective of the free movement of the mind at play...."

The idea that computer-based multimedia, with its "intrinsic characteristics" of integration, interactivity, immersion, hypermedia, and narrativity, has the potential to deliver significant benefits to humanity is a dominant theme of this collection. For the hyper-articulate Engelbart, who had come to believe by the 1960s that the complexity of mankind's problems was growing faster than its ability to develop solutions to those problems, man's problem-solving capability is the most important resource possessed by society and "[any] possibility for evolving an art or science that can couple directly and significantly to the continued development of that resource should warrant serious consideration."

For others, especially artboy types influenced by the cultural upheavals of the '60s, the appeal of computers and multimedia lay in their potential to disrupt traditional hierarchies and dissolve boundaries — of time and distance as well as "between making art, the artifact itself, and the experience of the work...." (Roy Ascott, "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision"). And for still others, men like Ted Nelson ("Computer Lib/Dream Machines"), the influential philosopher-cum-gadfly who was among the first to articulate the concept of hypermedia, computers and computer-generated multimedia were tools that could be used to knock down the walls of specialization and return us to "the roots of our civilization — the ability, which we once had, for everybody who could read to be able to read everything" — a necessary first step, he added, to our "once again becom[ing] a community of common access to a shared heritage."

As Multimedia makes clear, much of what earlier generations of computer scientists, artists, engineers, musicians, and theorists dreamed and imagined has come to pass. Today, ultralight portable computers with the ability to process staggering amounts of information are commonplace in college dorm rooms and executive office suites. The human genome has been mapped and a cornucopia of medical miracles lies just out of reach. The Internet and World Wide Web have knit large portions of the developed world together as never before, and communication between even the most far-flung places is instantaneous. We are told that in a few short years miniature computers embedded in almost everything will monitor the daily functioning of our built environment and make adjustments, without consulting us, when necessary. A few years after that, we will be able to shop and travel in virtual simulations of real or imagined places. And by the end of the century, according to some futurists, we will be able to upload ourselves to a virtual silicon-based medium, thereby eliminating altogether the attachment to our frail and imperfect bodies.

But none of these things is likely to happen as planned (the law of unintended consequences) — or without the direct involvement of thousands, if not millions, of scientists, engineers, politicians, entrepreneurs, artists — and, yes, you and me. As Myron Krueger ("Responsive Environments"), a computer scientist-turned-artist, wrote in 1977:

"We are incredibly attuned to the idea that the sole purpose of our technology is to solve problems. It also creates concepts and philosophy. We must more fully explore these aspects of our inventions, because the next generation of technology will speak to us, understand us, and perceive our behavior. It will enter every home and office and intercede between us and much of the information and experience we receive. The design of such intimate technology is an aesthetic issue as much as an engineering one. We must recognize this if we are to understand and choose what we become as a result of what we have made."

It is often said that to understand where we are headed, we need to know where we've been. Packer and Jordan have done us all a great service by assembling this detailed, thought-provoking, and at times troubling guide to the history of multimedia — and its implications for our collective future.

For citations to additional literature on this topic, refer to Literature of the Nonprofit Sector, using the subject heading "Computer technology."

Mitch Nauffts
Publisher/Editorial Director, Philanthropy News Digest
Foundation Center
New York, NY

posted: 9/25/01