In Digital Mosaics,
Stephen Holtzman introduces readers to a number of different
projects which all have one thing in common -- they push the online
experience as far as it can go. Whether he's discussing fractal
'sculptures' that can only exist in digital representations or
conversations with 'avatars' in 3-D virtual worlds, Holtzman's
examples continually bring the discussion back to one basic principle
-- we are not using computers to their highest and most unique
potential. It's a position he's been evangelizing for twenty years.
Now, as the president and CEO of Perspecta, Inc., he's able to
contribute even more directly to the realization of the possibilities
he's seen in the digital aesthetic, creating abstract new geographies
of information through which we will someday be able to navigate
the web.
RH: Before I started the tape, we spent a few minutes talking
about Beatrice and the metaphor of the website as magazine,
but this is a book about getting away from that metaphor.
SH: The very idea of a web page comes from print media, but
the potential for a digital medium goes beyond the traditional
metaphors that dominate the web today. That's not meant to be
critical or judgmental of people creating an online magazine. But
ultimately, if you want to create a digital magazine that unleashes
the power of the medium, you need to move beyond the page-based
metaphor and start developing ideas that are uniquely digital. If
you're looking for books by a particular author, for example, it might
show you the author, then link to all the books they've done, with
links to related books and so on, but if you're interested in a
publisher, the site will dynamically reorganize itself to accomodate
your preferences. That's a personalized view of information you can't
do in a paper magazine.
McLuhan talked about how every time we discover a new medium,
the first thing we do is force it to act like the media we already
know. Early television was visualized radio. The first movies were
moving photographs; it didn't occur to directors that the camera
could be moved around. Eventually you move beyond that and create
a form unique to the medium; right now we're in the early stages of
developing a language of expression that is purely digital.
RH: You mentioned McLuhan, who's acknowledged as the "patron
saint" of new media as a theoretician. But I was intrigued that you
went an extra step to identify William S. Burroughs as one of the
pioneers who, in print, tried to put into practice how people would
experience this new environment.
SH: Burroughs embodies the spirit of the truly digital quality
of non-linearity. When you finish Naked Lunch or other books
by him, you feel a coherence that isn't based on linearity or narrative
continuity, a coherence where pieces fit together in a mosaic. He's a
spiritual guide to our exploration of the digital world.
RH: Thinking of digital creations as "worlds" expands the
possibilities of what we're able to achieve in creating them.
SH: What I think is really interesting, beyond the practical and
familiar transition of modelling cyberspace on the real world, is an
abstract, immersive experience where you can see words and
concepts and dynamically reorganize them to fit together in another
mosaic. Part of the goal of the book is to evangelize that experience,
which we're seeing glimpses of on the web and in advanced research
labs, and to get people excited about using the web in this way.
RH: It's fascinating that one of the areas where the most progress
has been made in creating an immersive environment has been
gaming.
SH: That's not surprising. The goal of gaming is to engage
people; it's the key to making it commercially viable. And kids
approach the digital media with no bias. It's the kids growing up
today immersed in Doom that will learn to develop the new
paradigms for digital expression. They aren't anchored in the past
the way a person who worked in print media, then moved to the
web, is. Doom and Quake are the training grounds for the
pioneers who are going to lead us into the digital aesthetic.
RH: You worked on an interesting project with several other
people, including Phillip Glass, called "Ghost Dance": a digital
equivalent to a performance art space.
SH: The idea was to create an immersive experience that was
uniquely interactive. How do you create a musical experience that's
interactive? You tailor the experience to the individual. So in this
environment, with 1 to N people inside, each person adopts an
identity that is both visual and musical, and the interactions between
all the people creates music -- complex, rich counterpoints based on
who's there, what they're doing, how they interact with one another.
The result is a musical experience unlike anything we've seen before.
Music video, with its fast editing and immersive sound, was a sort of
training ground for this very rich visual and aural experience.
There's an appetite now for an even denser, more intense experience,
and "Ghost Dance" tries to embody that and take it further.
Unfortunately, to deliver that environment today on the web is just
not possible. We were running the prototype on supercomputers, and
it can't be done on a Pentium computer with a 28.8 modem. But the
computer that costs half a million today will be what everybody has
on their desktops for a thousand bucks in a few years. The hardware
will be there; the real issue is to develop the conceptual framework,
to change the way we think about the digital medium.
