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Multimedia, From Wagner To Virtual Reality

Edited by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, Foreword by William Gibson
W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London, 2001.
416 pp. illus.
$ 26.95
ISBN: 0-393-04979-5/6
Reviewed by Annick Bureaud, Paris, France. E-mail: bureaud@altern.org


Readers, compilations of texts on any topic one can think of, are mushrooming those days. I know one acquisition editor who dreams of "a real book by one single author". Multimedia, From Wagner To Virtual Reality distinguishes itself in this production, it is not "just another reader" but a key source book in the field of art, science and technology history.

This book is excellent in all respects. First of all by its topics and very title. Multimedia is a buzz word, over -and often mis- used, Packer and Jordan recontextualize the notion, it's evolution and the wide field of artistic and technical works it encompasses, from the "pre-electronic" ideas (Richard Wagner, the Futurists, Moholy-Nagy), to high tech research (Dan Sandin, Thomas DeFanti, Carolina Cruz-Neira), via the intellectual and creative agitation of the 70's (Allan Kaprow, Richard Higgins, John Cage). For the first time, a collection of fundamental texts, always commented, and even "requoted", but never read, largely because of their unavailability, are republished in one single volume. Among those are of course As We May Think, by Vannevar Bush, but also texts by Morton Heilig, Ivan Sutherland, Ted Nelson, Roy Ascott's Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision, an article from the 60's, very seldom known. Musing through those texts is mind-blowing both for the accuracy of the vision of the pioneers and for the evolution and the achievements in today's society.

Multimedia, From Wagner To Virtual Reality includes essays by artists, scientists, engineers and theoreticians. Which is terribly common and conventional. What makes a true difference here, is the structure of the compilation. Usually, it is done by the (social) "quality" of the writers, by general topics or by historical chronology. Packer and Jordan did it by five key concepts: integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersion, and narrativity. The mixing of writings by artists, engineers and theoreticians, on one same issue, put them truly on the same level and shows, better than a long essay, that the same concept or thought, do not belong to one single category of human depending on his/her job, but are distributed in every kind of mind, of intelligence. Even more important, it shows that artists did not follow the scientists-engineer's discoveries to include the tools, techniques and concepts into their art in a techno-fascination but that they took (take) their part in the game.

Multimedia, From Wagner To Virtual Reality is *the* compilation that any editor would like to have put together, with, however, one regret: 32 texts and one single female author (Lynn Hershman)! Come on!

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Updated 4 May 2001.




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