Interactive Medium Offers Portrait of the Artist as a CD-ROM Pioneer

Digital Highway. Interactive Television. New Media. Cyberspace. The Internet. Convergence.

You’d have to be sensory-deprived not to have noticed the arrival of a whole new set of buzzwords over the past six months--buzzwords that describe a wired, interactive future for work, play, school, shopping, communications and every other aspect of our daily lives.

While most of the technology these buzzwords refer to is years from actual delivery in the form of products or services, there is in fact a new medium emerging today that foretells the digital future and contains glimpses of its promise.

The medium--call it interactive media--is currently contained in titles published on CD-ROMs that play on either Macintosh or DOS personal computers.

What really put this new medium in the mainstream--at least for me--was when Blockbuster Video started running an experiment in the Bay Area a few weeks ago, renting CD-ROMs for use on Windows and Macintosh PCs, as well as Sega CDs, Philips CDI machines, and the new Panasonic Real 3DO machine. Now you really can choose between watching Sly Stallone hang off a cliff and exploring a new, virtual world interactively.

Interactive media is such a fundamentally new way of expressing yourself that it will lead to a remarkable new experience for human beings, one that rivals any of the other media--books, music, paintings, movies, photographs--in range and importance.

And, because it is a fundamentally new means of expression, there is also emerging a new breed of artist capable of mastering its tools and developing a new language for that creativity.

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These artists come from a wide range of backgrounds--programmers, lawyers, film makers, teachers, writers. Already in the short history of interactive media, these digital artists have learned several lessons about the new medium:

* CD-ROMs have a lot of space, so they can contain virtual worlds, limited only by the imagination--and budget--of the digital artist.

At first, people began creating titles by finding as much stuff as they could and throwing it onto these large disks. That wasn’t very satisfying. Then they started “repurposing” existing media--paintings, photographs, even movies--to try to create new titles with sights and sounds.

Most recently, it is precisely the process of creating new worlds--the serene beauty of “Myst,” the wacky worlds in “Spaceship Warlock,” the sinister rooms in “The 7th Guest”--that is leading to the most satisfying experiences.

* It is the ability to interact with the medium that makes it different. That means the artist cannot want to control the user’s entire experience; in interactive media, the user must be able to wander around at will.

Some artists aren’t so comfortable with that idea, since they have been trained to create an experience by managing all the elements of it. In fact, some of the most successful titles are hampered by their game-like design: You can’t advance until you satisfy some test.

But games usually restrict you from advancing before you satisfy some test. And that’s a restraint on interactivity. One of the original interactive titles--perhaps the original in some sense--was called “The Manhole,”--a small, black-and-white, illustrated world on the Macintosh that contained references to characters from children’s books. It was a delight for an adult to spend an hour or so wandering around in this world; kids could spend hours engrossed in it.

The same authors, using much more advanced tools, introduced “Myst” this fall--a lush CD-ROM for the Macintosh with beautifully illustrated scenes set to digital music. But the experience of using the title is frustrating, because you must solve complex problems to navigate the worlds on the disk.

On the other hand, the Animals! CD-ROM for Windows or Macintosh lets the user wander through a kind of three-dimensional zoo, with video and other materials supplied by the San Diego Zoo. The world created for the user is perfect; the artist lets you control the experience entirely.

* CD-ROMs don’t always work that well. It is a new medium, so the experience can be sloppy and frustrating. Artists, just beginning to explore the medium, haven’t yet developed a language or an aesthetic of what’s good and bad.

Even worse, CD-ROMs sometime just don’t work on your machine. I’ve looked at hundreds so far, and about 30% to 40% of the time I can’t make the title run on my computer the first time I try.

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Still--despite the cost, despite the potential frustration, despite the disappointments along the way--it is amazing to watch the new digital artist bumping around in a new digital medium, discovering new ways to delight and inform us.

And this new medium is emerging in a much more prosaic environment than most of the coverage of the interactive highway would have us imagine. Rather than sitting in the living room with our remote controls exploring the world interactively through our televisions, we’re all hunched over our PCs in the den or kitchen, exploring what’s on these shiny little CDs.