(c) Wendy M. Grossman 1994 Published in the Guardian as: "Digitally musical chairs" -- November 3, 1994, page 5. Report on the MIT Media Lab Open Day, Digital Expression: Are We Seeing a Technically Mediated Renaissance of the Arts? This is the pre-edited version. The most telling moment on the day that Hollywood met technology head-on was when ABC news commentator John Hockenberry, the moderator of the day’s proceedings, leaned forward and asked the audience for ideas. Onstage at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kresge Auditorium were Hockenberry, Michael Schulhof, the president and CEO of Sony America, Ray Smith, the president and CEO of Bell Atlantic, Jane Alexander, actress and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Nicholas Negroponte, the director of MIT’s Media Lab research centre and therefore the host of the event. They had been talking for an hour and a half about open access, about the audience waking up from its TV-induced stupor and taking charge, about a great, trapped well of creativity in America, of hearing a diversity of voices. So this was Hockenberry’s challenge to as much of that interactive audience as he had available: you’ve got the technology, what will you do with it? And no one out of those 1,200 people raised his hand and said, “I’ve got this wonderful multimedia experience I want to make about a boy and his pet rock,” or “We want to create an interactive sound tapestry about the history of our community.” No: one guy raised his hand and said he wanted to be able to distribute stuff to his friends (asked if he wanted to charge money for this, he said, “Umm....”); one said the tools for making art (like film equipment) needed to be a whole lot cheaper; and a third said he wanted to be able to wake up with an idea, send out a message over the Internet, assemble a team, and ROLL. The event was an open house hosted by the Media Lab for its sponsors and friends and titled Digital Expression: Are we seeing a technically mediated renaissance of the arts? To discuss this, the Media Lab assembled a remarkably diverse and multi-talented group: researchers from the lab, pop singer Peter Gabriel, director Peter Sellars, and artist Laurie Anderson; music producer Quincy Jones delivered the lunchtime speech. And those were just the folks on stage. Thread your way through the audience reading badges and you found the actress Nastassja Kinski, representatives of corporate sponsors Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Motorola, researchers from the Korean Institute of Technology and Cornell University’s music department, emissaries from New York City’s Lincoln Center, the publisher Alfred Knopf, Bell Labs, Bertelsmann, Coca-Cola, the Van Cliburn piano competition, and MTV. And then the mavericks, like Robert Moog (pronounced Mogue), now living in Asheville, North Carolina, and still making analog synthesisers with his four-person company; no interest in going digital, no. He shared a lunch table with MIT’s Marvin Minsky, the so-called father of artificial intelligence. Minsky, although he’s an important part of the Lab, wasn’t on the program. As a spectator, he seemed quite taken with the Chair, a hefty wooden throne encrusted with electronic sensors that flashed lights and played whatever musical sounds you -- or, rather, the lab’s resident composer, Tod Machover -- specified. It featured prominently in the day’s smash ending, a 1990s-style reenactment by the magicians Penn and Teller of a 19th century spirit cabinet, complete with banjo, mandolin, bell box, pie plates, and trumpet. In 19th century seances, sitters ‘controlled’ the medium by touching him or her on each side. In this case, Penn tied Teller to the chair in such a way that Teller couldn’t move without setting off a medley of lights and sounds. The chair itself has a serious, or at least seriously artistic, purpose -- the lab’s Tod Machover composed a piece for Penn Jillette to play on it as part of his research into possibilities for computer-enhanced musical instruments. This chair combines Machover’s work on hyperinstruments -- instruments with electronically expanded capabilities -- with work the physics group is doing on gesture recognition which essentially involves wiring transmitters and receivers so that when you wave your hand you break an electrical field. The disturbance can be transmitted to a computer and used to track your hand’s location much as a mouse ball’s location is tracked now. In the case of the chair, you sit on a transmitter pad that passes a very small electric current through your body; when you gesture, you break the field received by the chair’s sensors to turn on lights and make sounds. Long after the event ended, there was Minsky in his faded denim shirt, the pocket embroidered with Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters, experimenting with playing percussion by waving his hands and tapping his feet. But everyone was excited by new possibilities, from Quincy Jones, with his neighbourhood network (‘MUSIC’) aimed at bringing gang members back into the community electronically, to Nicholas Negroponte, who said that as soon as you get into the business of shipping bits instead of atoms (Schulhof ships atoms in the form of Walkmans, CDs, and other products) you can do things no one’s ever thought of before. He cited as an example a new personalised newspaper put together using technology developed at the media lab that services the 6,000-strong Indian community in New Jersey. Three concepts kept coming up again and again: interaction, open access, and content. This was an idealistic bunch. Bell Atlantic’s Ray Smith is, for example, is convinced that his interactive shopping and TV services now rolling out in West Virginia will, along with other technologies and a policy of open access, unleash a flood of American creativity that has until now had nowhere to go. Douglas Trumbull, president of the IMAX corporation, now moving into immersive rides for retail spaces, assured us that Back to the Future: the Ride, now on display at Universal Studios, has every bit as much character development and drama as a feature film, even if it is only four minutes long. It was left to Penn Jillette to dump some cynicism on the proceedings, saying afterwards that the notion of interactive art is nonsense -- that audiences want to experience a particular artist’s view of the world. It was certainly true that the folks on stage were not culled from the ranks of Internet surfers and Web page designers. To say, as Hockenberry did at one point, that Peter Gabriel, with his top-selling CD-ROM disc Xplora, and Peter Sellars, who is watching 75 percent of his audience walk out on his show in Chicago every night, are at opposite ends of the spectrum is specious. Both are internationally acclaimed and respected artists. If you want the other end of the scale, go find a starving folksinger who is supporting his music habit by making auditorium seats (name and address supplied on request). And that folksinger didn’t set out to be part of the ‘not-for-profit arts community’ whose access to technology Jane Alexander is so anxious to protect, either. But Alexander deserves some credit: she was the only person at the event to point out that while we may talk about the importance of not creating a society of information haves and have-nots, the demographics of the room did not reflect the face of America. They didn’t: mostly white, some Asians, very respectable percentage of women, no blacks, no Hispanics. This event has come at a time when Nicholas Negroponte, the lab’s founder and director, says the lab is changing course. Ten years ago, when the lab started up, the idea of multimedia as we now see it hitting the mainstream was startling, as was Negroponte’s often-discussed conception of computers as ‘sensory-deprived’. Now, he says, the capabilities for letting computers see and hear are there or at least can be there -- that’s a matter of products hitting the market, as they already are. The lab itself is moving on to the next frontier: understanding.