Multimedia - Review

From Wagner to Virtual Reality Edited by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001)

Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality is an edited anthology that outlines the engineering efforts and interactive terminals that have brought us closer to immersion in the human-computer interface. According to the choices made by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, there are artists and scientists to be found on the respective sides of this collaborative dialogue, and both are proportionally represented. Tantalizingly dubbed a "secret history," the book sets out to reveal the traces of man conversing with machine in five chapters devoted to the defining characteristics of multimedia developed by the editors: integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersion and narrativity.

"Integration" introduces the visionary theme with Richard Wagner's desire to unite all art forms in one expression and revisits some usual suspects, including F. T. Marinetti and Nam June Paik. "Interactivity" shifts the timeframe toward the mainframe and mixes cybernetics from Norbert Wiener with J. C. R. Licklider's collaborative call and John Cage's desire for computer participation. Moving on to "Hypermeida," the book waxes dreamily romantic in a systematic way with Ted Nelson's Xanadu preceding Tim Berners-Lee's "Information Management: A Proposal." The chapter on "Immersion" then enters cyberspace proper with William Gibson's now universal name that he claims "preceded any concept whatever" and one of its manifestations in Ivan Sutherland's "The Ultimate Display." Concluding with "Narrativity," the book seems to forget its dogged outline to discuss nonlinear narrative forms by declared cut-up novelists and branching navigators like William S. Burroughs and Lynn Hershman.

In summary Multimedia is a "secret history" entirely without revelations. It remains essential reading, but its flaws and omissions are perhaps more important than the declared input. Of the celebrated visionaries in its cyberspace hall of fame, only one contribution comes from a woman, and this is obviosly more an indication of the tilted gender balance in technology than an accusation leveled at the editors. Every noted breakthrough in hardware has paved the way to multimedia seems to involve a masculine prowess of command, control and domination, and it is certainly not classified information that the practical foundations for modern computing emerged from the military-industrial complex developed in the U. S. around World War II. Compiled in this patriarchal format, then, Multimedia reads more like modernity in maturity than a profoundly liberating development of all human expression. While the prospects for computer interaction as an extension of human communication are tremendous, this book reiterates t hat we are actually dealing with a contract between man and machine that should be negotiated further.

Multimedia ultimately makes its own best counterargument by choosing an inaugural address by Wagner. In his call for a totalizing artwork that the editors find so alluring, the comprehensive integration of the arts in a gesamtkunstwerk is aligned with a multimedia desire to embrace the full range of human experience in technology. Within this pivotal choice repeated in the subtitle of the book rests a astonishing case of historical amnesia and ideological naivete. A preferred musical score to the steadfast march of the Nazi rallies, Wagner's pompous sounds echo the emerging multimedia logic of humans acting as machines in a display of unison.

Shirin Neshat. Charta/80 pp./price unavailable (sb).

Silke Leverkuhne. Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim (Postfach 1140 D-49825 Neuenhaus)/48 pp./price unavailable (sb).

Willie Doherty: Extracts from a File. Steidl (Berliner Kunstler programm/DAAD, Markgrafenstr. 37, 10117 Berlin)/non-paginated/price unavailable (hb).

COPYRIGHT 2001 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group