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The New Media has taken us by surprise
with its interactive, participatory quality on a global scale.

The New Media's closest kin is, paradoxically, our oldest one:
Theatre--but in its original sense, when theatre was more of a festive form of play.
(Second of kin is the written word, the icon)

The internet's world wide web is the new stage:
the new "seeing place" (the original name of theatre).
Users perform with digital media on this virtual stage.
As with theatre, the net can be a type of entertainment
based on accepted conventions and protocols.
It can also be a space of incantations,
the way Antonin Artaud conceived of theatre:
the double of an unknown with which it seeks to link.

The young history of the internet is fascinating in its diversity:
From the Pentagon's ARPANET of the late 60s to its use for multimedia
with Tim Berners-Lee's development at CERN of the world wide web.
(Two books which cover this history are
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
and Weaving the Web by the inventor of the WWW)

A special characteristic of the Internet is its design as a distributive network.
It has no center, no scattered centers. Everything is next to everything else.
The Internet may be a good model of how our mind works.
The net is a space of play and creation linking all forms of human knowledge.
Because of its interactive structure, the Internet may also be a stage for emergence.
Surprising connections may give rise to something radically new.

The web is taking interactivity to new heights, yet Tim Berners-Lee
thinks that we barely begin to understand its interactive heart.
He dreams of a web which could allow us to detect new relationships
and unveil entirely different ways to see our world. The web has not taken us that far yet.
As Director of the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C], he works on that dream.
In his book Weaving the Web Berners-Lee wrote:
"Whether a group can advance comes down to creating the right connectivity
between people--in a family, a company, a country, or the world."

The right connectivity depends on the quality of interactivity:
it has to promote intuition (the ability to link creatively half-formed ideas).
The raw ideas must be at play rather than tied down to rigid structures.
Special filters & search engines must help sift through massive amounts of information.
Such interactive spaces become nets & catalysts to facilitate connectivity.

And what about fiction and human expression?
Mark Pesce, co-creator of the Virtual Reality Markup Language,
feels that the digital world still has to develop an emotional voice.
(See his book   VRML:ÊBrowsing & Building Cyberspace with foreword by Tim Berners-Lee)
He has also argued that hard science-fiction is shaping virtual reality
and he forecasts the emergence of information artists who
"transform the textual meaning of a query into something tangible, sensual and sensible."

Virtual space feels rather cold. But one day the web will awaken to emotion.
The Internet is becoming another engine of creation.
Once again: play is the thing--but at a new level.
Who knows what surprises wait patiently for us.
Or do we need to conjure them?

Openings (most recent entries appear first)

Media-in-Transition  This is a concept of the graduate program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. It is also the title of a series of conferences at MIT on this subject. The emergence of new media, particularly digital, is forcing us to rethink the nature and relationships to previous media.

The Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology remains the experimental hotbed of virtual interactivity. It is a source of ideas related to the new media.

The Internet Society advocates the open evolution of the global Internet and its related technologies. They publish an informational magazine about their activities

Ben Segal was with Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN in Switzerland. He remains there and offers interested details about the early development of the world wide web. He is a member of the Internet Society.

Another site to check periodically is Esther Dyson's Edventure.

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interactive art space      © 2000 by luis o. arata   contents |  here | there | everywhere