Interactive multimedia (panel session): a new creative frontier or just a new commodity?

The last one hundred and fifty years have generated an avalanche of visual technologies through which an ever expanding visual culture has been marketed to mass audiences. From the invention of photography in 1839 to film in the 1890's and the marketing of television in the 1940's-50's, our steady diet of images has increased our voracious appetite by quantum leaps. In the 1990's we are faced with another invention of great potential, much hype and as yet unforseen repercussions-interactive multimedia. "Employing these new media requires inventiveness as well as overcoming the double jeopardy of techno-phobias and the strictures of a paper/print design mentality; it calls upon practitioners operating in a new electronic paradigm whose parameters are still forming to recreate the roles of designer, artist and entertainer .. " It remains to be seen to what extent this new communication commodity truly represents a new artistic frontier. A multi-sensory dynamic form of communication, multimedia enables a new unprecedented level of intermediality between the previously relatively separate forms of writing, voice, music, still images, motion pictures and video. It promises innovative intermedia relationships between these in non-linear, user-driven options incorporating the interactive game format along with more passive reception and unlimited playback options. To be sure, it recycles older communication products from photography, film and books to museum art collections. Is multimedia as yet more than the sum of its recycled parts? Michael Nash states that "The promise of the new media lies in its ability to intertextualize the elements that constitute our tele-visual systems of meaning with a depth and richness that will enable artists to more fully mirror the activities of consciousness, and to engineer new dialogues between its reflection and articulation, between reading and writing." Interactive multimedia are a genre of culture commodities that stimulate consumer interest with the promise of repeated and engaged usage. Yet "the significance of interactivity extends far beyond an emergence of a more enticing set of commodities, though that they certainly are. Interactivity is also not reducible to a new art genre, though that too, it certainly is becoming. Rather, we intuit interactivity as a fundamental change in socialized patterns of intersubjectivity, forms of knowledge and communication and relationship to objects. In the process, notions of self, agency, art and commodity are reconfigured ... lt should come as no surprise then that art... is claiming interactivity as its arena along-side with inert objecthood." Artists and users/consumers alike have a heightened sense that multimedia plays a crucial role in the tidal wave of changes sweeping the late twentieth century world of communications. The questions that arise are vast. This panel will begin to tackle some of them. Panel Goals and Issues This roundtable of artists and producers share brief segments from their most recent work and address a range of questions: What makes for successful interactivity and multi-sensory communication? The highs and lows of making multimedia for the mass market: Can artistic innovation flourish in a fiercely competitive market, corporate climate and bottom-line driven business plans? Are we entering a Renaissance or an electronic sweatshop? What is the potential of digital cash for Internet distribution by artists? And what are the realities of selling creative work to multimedia companies: How are artists' rights and copyrights effected?