I got into interactive media by way of long-form multimedia CD-ROMs. Early in 1994, Bob Stein, CEO of The Voyager Company, demoed Who Built America?, which took a history textbook and augmented it with archival sources, recorded audio and video, and other multimedia elements that enriched the primary text. It was an epiphanic moment, where I realized exactly the work I wanted to be doing. That summer, after much pestering, I was hired as a production associate by Voyager, where I ended up working for two years, on titles including First Person: Donald Norman, This is Spinal Tap, For All Mankind, and Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel.
I left in 1996, and not long after that, Voyager was sold, sold again, and essentially evaporated along with the entire multimedia CD-ROM market. In its place emerged the Web, whose ascendancy still continues unabated.
With the demise of CD-ROM, longform, thoughtful multimedia essentially died. Works that intelligently combine detailed text, video, audio, animations, and interactivity are nowhere to be found on the Web. For 15 years, this has upset me, because as someone who loves thoughtful explorations of subject matter (books, documentaries, This American Life, whathaveyou), and who experienced the thrill of well-crafted multimedia, it felt shameful that this form had died.
And this is perhaps what most excites me about iPad. “iBooks” are fine and all, but simply old wine in a new bottle. The magazine experiments put forth by Wired and Bonnier begin to demonstrate this exciting new direction, but such publications, with their monthly intervals, still can’t really go deep. Seeing The Elements gives me more hope.
Dale Dougherty’s recent post “The iPad Needs It’s Hypercard” covers very similar territory to what I wrote here. GMTA!
Rossetti Archive?
Valley of the Shadow?
But, yes, the iPad might make a real difference here. One issue is bound to be resolution; it’s a big screen, but it’s not really so big that you can have lots of text and lots of video at once.
You know: we’ve really not made that much progress since First Person on integrating video and text.
You used to do great multi-media movie reviews on your blog, a practice I wish you would have kept up.
I’m hoping for the same thing. After all, if the iPad can give new life to comix & the graphic novel, why shouldn’t it encourage experimental and kinetic typographic treatments, mixed with image, video, & animation?
The other difference from early CD-ROMs is that now we can seamlessly integrate links to web content external to the text as part of the design, without losing the possibility of the circumscribed multimedia essay.
@Peter It’s obvious you were not fortunate enough to ever use Puppet Motel. That “early cd-rom†DID integrate with seemlessly with text, graphics and videos that were available on Laurie Anderson’s website. That was one of the things that made it so innovative — 15 years ago!