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Because We Are Digital
crossing the boundaries
page 3 of 7CROSS FERTILIZATION The idea that one field might enrich another is also not a new one. Thought it seems to be forgotten by the over specialization emphasized in our learning institutions, the concept and practice of what is currently termed multimedia is an age-old notion. Multimedia is not suggested merely by technological advancement, but rather it is grounded in fundamental human practice which predates the invention of computer by thousands of years. Multimedia's early uses were cross disciplinary in an un-self conscious way. The advent of the computer did not create the technical tangle of multimedia, but rather manifests a pre-existing need in our culture for a more democratic, universal, and diverse way to communicate. We can see multimedia in the burial rituals of the ancient Egyptians who made no demarcation between media employed in the great technology of the pyramids and their elaborate burial rituals. These burial sites combined elements of architecture, writing, sculpture, and during the rite, even music and performance, all for the purpose of captivating and mystifying the laity under the dominance of their rulers. In the Middle Ages, the prevalent form of multimedia was at the same time a form of mass communication. The cathedral communicated the awe - inspiring Christian spiritual doctrine, which was the dominant means of rationalizing human existence. The message was made stronger by its embodiment in a variety of media stimulating the senses: visual (stained glass and statues), sound (music and hymn), touch and taste (performance and mass) and smell (incense and myrrh). Writing itself was the means for codifying the knowledge held in the cathedral, the knowledge to sort out the patterns of our existence, to know the unknowable. All of these technologies were beyond the reach of the ordinary man, since books were tremendously expensive to produce and few could read. The expense and duration of constructing a cathedral made it an option only for the wealthy. It was of course not portable, so it remained in a central location, accessible only to those in its immediate vicinity. Due to these inherent and perhaps intentional, constraints, knowledge and thus power were concentrated in the hands of the theocracy. It was not until the advent of the printed book that the quest for knowledge could become a part of a universally inclusive culture. Yet printing come with a price: a devaluation of multimodal communication. Victor Hugo comments further on the advent of the printing, its narrowing of our field of expression, and the dominance of the word over the image in his 19th century novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame. A character in his novel, a priest in Fifteenth Century France, directly after the invention of movable type, compares the newly invented book to the cathedral and states "this will kill that" - the book will kill the cathedral. Yet it did not. Hugo's phrase also refers to the to the conflict between the text of the book and the multimedia imagery of the church. By the 19th century, the text had become dominant as a means of discourse. For a century to follow, the word, through the great dissemination of the written text, was the primary source for creative inspiration. If nothing else, it allowed for the distribution of description pornography and a stimulation that gave rise to Modernism. But all was short-lived: in the Twentieth Century Marshall McLuhan, in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, foresaw the rise of the image, empowered by global visual media such as television. He envisioned 'the civilization of imagery' wherein the word is no longer the sole stimulating force to the imagination. Today there is an unanswerable conundrum - which is it that stimulates the imagination first or more, the word or the image? The computer doesn't care, because it's a multimedia cathedral! |
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This site ©2003 Charles H. Traub and Jonathan Lipkin. Maintained by webmaster@intherealmofthecircuit.com. | |
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| Futurism :: Henson, Jim :: Flash, Grandmaster :: Barthes, Roland :: Baudelaire, Charles :: National History Museum, London :: PONG :: Novak, Marcos :: Couture, Lise Anne :: University of Timbuktu :: Dynamism :: K'ang, Emperor :: Jones, Bill T. :: Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement (SSM) :: Sears Roebuck catalog :: Oswald, John :: Sankore mosque :: Heisenberg, Werner :: Bailey, James A. :: Alighieri, Dante :: | ||
