Pedro Meyer's I Photograph to Remember, one of the first photo CD-ROMs, is a narrative of the his parents' death. It utilizes a simple interface through which the viewer can access single black and white photographs or start the narrative from any particular image, each of which is accompanied by its own voice-over by Meyer. Besides establishing a simple audio-visual information framework, Meyer's use of audio emphasizes CD-ROMs' lineage from slide shows rather than from books. For one thing, an image viewed on a computer monitor has more in common with a projected slide than with an image printed on paper, especially in terms of luminosity range, but also in terms of objecthood/commodification. More importantly, the text-audio-visual format used by CD-ROMs owes a lot of its communication strategies to multiple-projector audio-visual slide programs (the original multimedia). What's interesting about Meyer's CD-ROM is that he absolutely refuses to include any of the technological glitz we've come to expect of multi-media slide shows or digital multimedia - fades to multiple images, lots of buttons, background information, colorful graphics, rock muzak, Quicktime movies, etc. I Photograph to Remember feels like someone using one projector to show slides and talking about each one, about as primitive a form of multimedia as we could obtain. It's a calculated risk - in exchange for the bells and whistles of a more complicated (and interactive) interface, Meyer has opted for narrative and artistic coherence. For Meyer, narrative isn't an organizing structure, it's the human part of documentary, less a way to access information than a way to identify with experience.

Even though the photographic documentation of death by cancer isn't a new topic, and Meyer's photographs aren't breaking any new aesthetic ground, I Photograph to Remember remains a unique CD-ROM. Unlike most other CD-ROMs, which are complicated social productions of technological teamwork and corporate group think, I Photograph to Remember remains an intensely personal endeavor. From Meyer's own voice on the audio track to the (almost exclusive) use of his own photographs, Meyer's CD-ROM makes a case for the importance and shape of the individual artistic voice in the age of intricate interactive interfaces. Instead of constructing a technological interface, Meyer constructs a character, the photographer photographing his parents' deaths, the storyteller. It's slow, it's simple, and it works. Which is not to say that by concentrating on his own photographs, his own experience of his parents and his parents' death, Meyer doesn't miss a golden opportunity to capitalize on what multimedia might bring to an examination of what was tumultuous and historically complex about his parents lives (they were Jewish refugees first from Germany then from Franco's Spain and eventually became early importers of Japanese goods to Mexico). But maybe we should be satisfied with the fact that Meyer did what he did - produce a successful personal statement in a medium that is notoriously impersonal, and demonstrate that individual voices are just as important to the digital world as hyperactive interfaces.

The Dawn of the Master Narrative

From Alice to Ocean, Robyn Davidson and Rick Smolan, Against All Odds Productions 1992

Unlike I Photograph to Remember, From Alice to Ocean is a product of corporate marketing and technological boosterism. Produced by Against All Odds and distributed by Apple Computer to demonstrate the possibilities of interactive publishing, From Alice to Ocean takes as its subject young woman explorer Robyn Davidson's trek across the Australian outback on camel. In true corporate fashion there's a little something for everyone here: gender bending female role model, intrepid (if a little nerdish) young male photographer, beautiful nature photography, Quicktime movies of wise aboriginals and other people of color. Even though Davidson's adventure was not only dangerous, but socially daring, the production team transformed this personal drama into a piece of feel-good fluff, geared to a corporate marketing conception of an eight-year old's understanding of the world.

None of which takes away from the fact that in the process of turning an adventure story into a sales pitch for interactive multimedia education, the CD's production team created the model of interactive multimedia informational architecture. In place of drama, From Alice uses Davidson's narrative as an organizational superstructure, a path dotted with clickable nodes through which to access other media, such as movies, maps, songs, still photographs, and texts. For instance, a single point on the journey map might show up as several photographs, from which the viewer can see a Quicktime movie about how the photo was made, or Robyn Davidson telling a story, or an explanation of one of the details in the photograph. In a sense, From Alice is a successful (though still boring) experiment in photographic context, and in another it illustrates the effect multimedia linking has had on narrative. In multimedia settings, narrative linearity is replaced by rhizomatic branching, an organizing principle in which one point doesn't lead to another so much as it branches out to many more each of which which branches out to many more, conceivably ad infinitum. (For a more complete if somewhat torturous description of rhizome structure see Deleuze and Guatarri's A Thousand Plateaus). Even though there are several narrative devices to keep order, Alice to Ocean uncovers the possibilities of non-linear linking, that is, the ability of multimedia to go from one screen to another in several directions instead of only one. In Alice to Ocean, each photograph in the main narrative provides an opportunity for a new narrative, that of the photo itself.

Every time the viewer presses a button, a new narrative is created from all the possibilities available. In this way, each viewer's interactivity leads to a personal statement. Limited as they are, each of these narratives, each of the latent meanings contained in all the possible meanings, depends on a choice: to interrupt, to continue, to diverge. No matter how dummied down, From Alice is the first truly multimedia CD-ROM, the first work that makes it clear that choice is the true master narrative of interactive multimedia, the story we all have to accept before multimedia can jump from technological fad to seamless depiction of reality. Constructing one's own narrative is a revolutionary approach to information gathering and story-telling. The problem is that the complicated real-world process and large amounts of money needed to design interfaces, collect material, and produce multi-media tends toward corporate sponsorship and bottom-line thinking (though not always). The challenge of multimedia - as From Alice to Ocean makes absolutely clear - is not so much to construct alternative narratives, but to subvert a production and distribution process that finds deviation from the norm both dangerous and unprofitable. Sound familiar_

The Politics of Choice

Three Works: Stephen Axelrad, Manual, Esther Parada

The California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside, 1996

Bringing together artists with a track record of politically oppositional work and media experience, Three Works takes on the powers that be with the power of interactive technology. Even though interactivity implies choice, and choice implies some kind of basic freedom, different artists have different ideas about what that freedom implies. Three Works explores different ideas of interactivity both as an aesthetic and as a politics.

The first blow against the empire comes from Esther Parada, who uses the California Museum of Photography's collection of Firestone stereo cards (the late-19th century forerunner of immersive VR) to suggest the ways representation colluded with U.S. imperialism in Central America. Expanding on the idea of multimedia as a complex slide lecture, Parada quotes period texts, provides examples from the stereo card collection, explores the marketing techniques employed by Firestone, and even throws in some academic talking-heads for good measure. Parada's take on U.S. foreign policy is right on target, but her understanding of interactivity starts and stops with button pushing to the next screen. In some ways Parada's work is less a series of alternative informational paths than a one way street to a single conclusion. This conclusion (that the arguments for U.S. imperialism were realized and furthered in popular representational forms) is in turn weakened by a paucity of material--a few political cartoons, the work of a jingoistic travel/political writer, and only a few stereo cards from the entire collection of thousands. Audio explanations help, but in the end, Parada's section opts for a single contextual meaning over informational complexity. The lack of complexity not only poses problems from a historical viewpoint (What about American dissent, changing attitudes, alternate voices, etc._), it also situates the viewer as a simple learning machine - input only. Although the idea is to make revisionary history fun (and pushing buttons can be fun!), there's too little history and no chance for the viewer to actually do the revising; all that's left is to click the mouse on cue.

Constructed Forest by the collaborative team Manual (Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill) examines ecological issues surrounding trees. Billed as a lexicon of terms both political and aesthetic, "Constructed Forest"; benefits from a simple interface - the viewer chooses a letter, then chooses a word that begins with that letter from a multiple word screen, then chooses various informational possibilities from the word's own screen. "Constructed Forest"; has its shortcomings, most importantly, the number of terms, which could be expanded greatly. What makes it so good is Manual's playful engagement with the "multi" part of multimedia.

David Axelrad's Self Museum explores choice in the context of contemporary museum practices. Based on a drag-and-drop game-style interface, "Self Museum" gives viewers the opportunity to collect works of art , construct their own exhibitions, and discover the significance of their choices. It's a great idea and a terrific interface; the real problem is the work itself, snapshots, letters, and other personal paraphernalia, which is all about Axelrad - Axelrad's family eating habits, his thrill-seeking childhood sweetheart, etc. If you can get beyond the information's personal content, Axelrad's piece delivers a droll comment on the relationship between possessions and self, archive construction and identity, display and self-worth. Even though the CD-ROM only comes with eight artworks, Axelrad goes the extra mile and keeps posting new ones (ad infinitum_) as downloadable files on his Web site. Think of it as the promise of unlimited amounts of information butting heads with the hermetic containment of narcissistic self-referentiality.

Even though Axelrad asks us to question our notion of what informational choice can actually deliver, he hasn't forgotten how to laugh. A small introductory section allows the viewer to put together a museum board of directors with choices ranging from angry boy, to Viking Motel (a motel sign), to Isis, each with its own accompanying video. Choose four and they interact to form a single board ethic, relayed by a museum staffer (director_) who reads the museum's new mission statement from a video screen. The different statements are zany, unpredictable, biting social satires that roast in equal degrees group process, liberal social agendas, modernist aesthetic rhetoric, and postmodern fadishness. But the longer we play, the clearer it becomes that there are many more possible board members than mission statements, more individuals than social contracts, more choices than possible outcomes. Goofy and self-centered as it is, Axelrad's museum manages to remind us that information and interactivity are social as well as technological constructs.

A Little Museum Music

Robert Mapplethorpe: An Overview, Digital Collections Inc., 1995

Robert Mapplethorpe: An Overview is as close as digital multimedia gets to a classic museum catalog and, like most catalogs, there are two important parts: essays and pictures. Given that this is multimedia, the essay section has morphed into six different audio-visual programs that explore/interpret different htmlects of Mapplethorpe's work ("Early Work," "The Controversy," "Legacy," etc.) A lot of the interpretive voice-over is pure canonization fodder, though the inclusion of 16 short Quicktime videos of art world luminaries (Leo Castelli, Susan Sontag, and others) manages to hedge the unitary voice/single interpretation of the voice-over. Occasionally, especially in the "Controversy" section, both sides of issues such as Mapplethorpe's possible racism and the dispute around NEA funding are actually aired. But the most effective part of Mapplethorpe's explanatory isn't the direct communication of the voice-overs - it's the cello soundtrack behind the voice-over. The simple classicism of the cello piece rings surprisingly true to Mapplethorpe's photographs and, unlike the greater part of the voice-over, the soundtrack provides for a truly new and unexpected reading of Mapplethorpe's work. Including the cello might have been a simple touch, but it somehow manages to imply that the way we go about interpreting the work of an artist may never be the same.

The second part of Mapplethorpe is a "photo gallery" of over 100 images accessed through a "light-table format." Each photo can be enlarged to screen size and is accompanied by a control panel which gives the viewer the opportunity to set up an individualized slide program, sort for different categories, and look up specific information on the image, such as original negative size, medium etc. The bad news is that the creators of Mapplethorpe made a simple interface that doesn't take advantage of multimedia linking (why not be able to access interpretive sections from the audio-visual essays_ Why not cross reference photographs with the extremely well done chronology_). It's as if in their rush to canonize Mapplethorpe the CD-ROM producers decided to canonize the ink-on-paper museum catalog as well, missing the opportunity to mix up, surprise, and renegotiate the whole process of discovering an artist's life and work through multi-media.

The good news is that simple interface or not, Mapplethorpe pays attention to the photographic image as a entity in and of itself and not simply another configuration of 1s and 0s in the digital mix. Not only are the photographs in the photo gallery beautifully reproduced, they are enlargeable - the viewer can magnify the image up to 16x. Even though things start to pixel out at around 4x, the opportunity to check in on visual details (Is Ken Moody circumcised_) proves irresistible. For all its shortcomings, Mapplethorpe never loses sight of the fact that one of the irreducible joys of photographs lies in the act of looking. By leveraging that power to see, and giving its control to the viewer, Mapplethorpe finds a way to honor Mapplethorpe's impeccable craftsmanship while transforming the experience of viewing to a distinctly digital mode.

Bargains and Contracts

Truths & Fictions, Pedro Meyer, Voyager, 1995

Although Pedro Meyer's second CD-ROM moves beyond the simple audio-visual structure of I Photograph to Remember, Truths and Fictions is still loosely based on a narrative: Meyer's gradual movement from the unmanipulated, documentary mode of photography into digital manipulation. Meyer's aesthetic journey is given form by Truth and Fiction's different sections: an articulate voice-over analysis of Meyer's work by Jonathan Green, a gallery of 92 images, a section of correspondence dealing with digital photography, and a digital studio, all of which can be accessed in both English and Spanish.

Though Green makes a case for the ultimate photographic nature of digital photography and Meyer has supposedly completed the journey to digital manipulation, Truths and Fictions is, more than anything, about Meyer's struggle to accept the conditions of his Faustian bargain. To utilize the unlimited visual potential of digital manipulation, Meyer understands he must first give up any claim to the visual and social veracity on which documentary photography rests its case. Second thoughts are sprinkled throughout Meyer's audio commentary, but it becomes most apparent in "the digital studio." In this section many of the manipulated photographs are broken down to their ",originals," with Meyer's voice-over providing the whys and wherefores of manipulation. It's as if Meyer can't bear the thought of these manipulations somehow being mistaken for a straight photograph, as if the real danger of the digital universe was the disappearance of an original unarguable reality and the relationship of that reality to a photographic image. The digital studio gives Meyer the opportunity to base his digital "truth beyond facts" in the veracity of unmanipulated, and seemingly more factual, photographs. What he ends up with is a multi-megabyte contradiction that demonstrates how far our culture still has to go to complete its perceptual and psychological contract with the visual reality of digital images.

The Correspondence section takes Meyer's personal digital journey into a broader discussion of how the photographic medium has been changed by the digital revolution. Meyer invited responses from nearly 100 photographers, curators, and writers from all over the world and reproduces their resonses. They range from the suitably morose ("I believe we are beginning to sense the immersion into eschatological night-time" -Joel Peter Witkin) to the heartbreakingly real (Mel Rosenthal's tape recorded message detailing the debilitating effects of his repetitive stress condition) to the experimental (Steve Dietz's caustic multimedia letter-about-a-letter). Besides making it clear that the jury is still out regarding the effects of digital photography, the Correspondence section demonstrates one of digital multimedia's great strengths: content capacity. Forget text boxes. Meyer's idea of reproducing responses is to provide a photographic reproduction of the original (oops, there it is!) letter (or cassette tape); photographs that might have accompanied it; a short bio for each respondent; audio (if provided by the respondent); and a double pop-up index of all the respondents (classified both by country of origin and alphabetically!). Meyer uses all this capacity not to prove a particular point of view but to emphasize multiplicity, not only in viewpoint but also in media. Utilizing multimedia's ability to translate everything from high-resolution photography to musical composition, the correspondence section is a wonderful, quirky, archive that feels like a bottomless well of information. Unlike his own work, Meyer lets this archive stand on its own, unruly, unexplained, and just plain wonderful.

The Message is the Message

A Bronx Family Album: The Impact of AIDS, Steve Hart

Scalo, 1997

A Bronx Family Album: The Impact of AIDS is really two different programs. The first is a perfunctory list of AIDS resources and interviews with AIDS health-care specialists. The second is a riveting hour-long sequence of black and white photographs with voice-over that describes with heartbreaking detail the life of a family living on the edge of American society.

Photographed and tape-recorded by photojournalist Steve Hart, A Bronx Family Album follows Ralph and Sensa and their 6 children over a period of five years. It's a simple but moving portrayal that begins by investigating the adults but ends as an outpouring of sympathy for the children, all of whom are HIV-. No matter what we think the causes of the parent's problems, there's no escaping their effect on the children whose lives - though not empty of tender moments - are characterized by physical abuse, drug usage, crushing poverty, unprotected sexual promiscuity, and abandonment. They bounce back only to be knocked down again. At one point, 12-year-old Stephanie has witnessed physical abuse, the death of a parent, separation from her sisters and then her stepfather (all within a month period), and finally listens to her aunt tell her that she can't keep her anymore and that she'll be put up for adoption. Stephanie starts to cry, at first softly and then uncontrollably. Hart's voice-over is a lesson in the limitations of social documentary: "This is the first time in five years I had seen Stephanie cry. She didn't even cry at her mother's death. It was so painful for me to witness, it was the first time in my career I was unable to take a photograph."

The seriousness of Hart's project permeates every htmlect of A Bronx Family Album. It's not only that Hart takes himself seriously and his subjects seriously, he takes his viewers seriously also. The CD's screen design is distinguished by its large, beautifully rendered photographs and simple, easy to read sans serif typeface. Interviews appear in black-on-white text boxes. It's as if the designers considered that viewing a monitor is a different visual experience than viewing a book and then went about figuring out what was essential to the screen experience. Besides increased legibility, the results look great. There are contextual buttons hidden in the photographs through which the viewer can access in-depth interviews or go to other parts of the CD-ROM, but that's about as interactive as Hart allows. The simple directness of Hart's CD-ROM renders the interface almost invisible, and what we are left with is less about the nature of digital information than it is about the cruel destiny of a poverty-stricken family. Unlike Pedro Meyer's I Photograph to Remember, Hart's story is full of twists and turns, a large cast of characters, and an ending impossible to predict.

Even thoug it's only minimally interactive, A Bronx Family Album is an important digital creation. Like the best music videos it combines visual and audio data streams into a seamless single medium, with a message unavailable to either visual or audio component alone. Hart is a gifted photographer, able to create moving and complicated visual statements about his subjects, but without the specificity of the voice-over, his photographs become another collection of interesting pictures dealing with poor people. Combining them with the emotionally deadpan delivery of the voice-over transforms both into a powerful social narrative. Using voice-over to create a context for social documentary photographs isn't exactly new - Jacob Riis began showing How the Other Half Lives, a crusade against the social evils of tenement housing, as a lantern-slide lecture. But Hart's CD-ROM takes this format into the realm of mass-distribution culture. Hart is well aware of the way his combination of audio-visual materials creates a particular message: A Bronx Family Album is one of the few photo CDs in which the viewer cannot opt to view the photographs without their accompanying soundtrack (even if it's reduced to a barely audible squawk); neither is there any way to view the photographs out of sequence. A Bronx Family Album may not be a milestone in interactive architecture, but by controlling the context of his photographs, Hart has done much more. He's told us what he found out about a family living in the Bronx. For Hart, as with legions of concerned photographers before him, the message is the only thing that matters, the only way to remain true to his subjects, the only way to change the world. Everything about A Bronx Family Album reflects the integrity, importance, and most crucially, the possibility of pursuing that goal in the digital age.