Robosapiens: Evolution of a New Species (review)

Readers—compilations of texts on any topic one can think of—are mushrooming those days. I know one acquisitions editor who dreams of "a real book by one single author." Multimedia, From Wagner to Virtual Reality distinguishes itself as 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 by its topics and very title. Multimedia is a buzzword, over- and often misused. Packer and Jordan recontextualize the notion, its 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 1970s (Allan Kaprow, Richard Higgins, John Cage). For the first time, a collection of fundamental texts, always commented upon 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, as well as texts by Morton Heilig, Ivan Sutherland and Ted Nelson, and Roy Ascott's "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision," a little-known article from the 1960s. Musing through those texts is mind-blowing, both for the accuracy of the vision of the pioneers and for the evolution and the achievements of today's society.

Multimedia, From Wagner to Virtual Reality includes essays by artists, scientists, engineers and theoreticians. This is terribly common and conventional, but what makes a true difference here is the structure of the compilation. Usually organization is done by the (social) "quality" of the writers, by general topic or by historical chronology. Packer and Jordan structured the book according to five key concepts: integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersion, and narrativity. The mixing of writings by artists, engineers and theoreticians on a single issue puts them all truly on the same level and shows, better than a long essay, that the same concept or thought need not belong to one single category of human, depending on his/her job, but is distributed in every kind of mind or intelligence. Even more important, it shows that artists did not merely adapt the discoveries of scientists and engineers and include the tools, techniques and concepts in their art as a sort of techno-fascination, but that they play (and played) their own part in the game.