Videos: Early 1990s Multimedia

21st Century Art set out to create a multi-authored multimedia art "world" in 1994. Each member would design a geographical area of their choosing, and we'd all pitch in to build it. It was a sprawling concept to try to explain, especially in those pre-Internet days, and it was meant to be in the same vein as The Residents' CD-ROMs put out by Voyager, that were the pinnacle of multimedia art at the time (and today, unplayable). We put together this tongue-in-cheek travelogue demo and presented it to venture capitalists in NYC, who were, I suppose predictably, baffled. Most of the 3D animation was by Karlo Takki.

21st Century Art set out to create a multi-authored multimedia art "world" in 1994. Each member would design a geographical area of their choosing, and we'd all pitch in to build it. It was a sprawling concept to try to explain, especially in those pre-Internet days, and it was meant to be in the same vein as The Residents' CD-ROMs put out by Voyager, that were the pinnacle of multimedia art at the time (and today, unplayable). We put together this tongue-in-cheek travelogue demo and presented it to venture capitalists in NYC, who were, I suppose predictably, baffled. Most of the 3D animation was by Karlo Takki.

IMPLANTS FOR SUCCESS from the CD-ROM compilation "Never Mind the Broderbunds, Here's 21CA" by 21st Century Art circa 1993Script by John Chmaj Narration and assembly by Frank Coleman Graphics from various clip art libraries of the timeA relic from the dawn of the interactive age, salvaged from a deteriorating VHS tape. Business as usual in 2010.

from the CD-ROM compilation "Never Mind the Broderbunds, Here's 21CA" by 21st Century Art.Concept and Animation by Karlo Takki. Circa 1993. 1st Prize Winner for Comedy at the 1994 International QuickTime Film Festival in San Francisco.

DISCOUNT HOUSE OF WORSHIP from the CD-ROM compilation "Never Mind the Broderbunds, Here's 21CA" by 21st Century Art circa 1993Script by John Chmaj, Frank Coleman, Kevin Foley & Tim Halle Narration and assembly by Frank Coleman Graphics from various clip art libraries of the timeA relic from the dawn of the interactive age, salvaged from a deteriorating VHS tape. Will quite possibly still piss people off in 2010.

From "Never Mind the Broderbunds, Here's 21CA" by 21st Century Art (1993). The first independent CD-ROM.Script by John Chmaj, Frank Coleman, Kevin Foley, Karlo Takki & Tim Halle. Narration, sound and assembly by Frank Coleman. Graphics from various clip art libraries of the time. Prescience? What prescience?

from the CD-ROM compilation "Never Mind the Broderbunds, Here's 21CA" by 21st Century Art.Music by Blood Blister. Animation by Frank Coleman. Concept and Direction by Kevin Foley. Circa 1992.Kevin and I worked side by side putting this together after hours at the Kodak Multimedia Lab where we both worked in Lowell, MA. We were feeling our way with the new tools and technologies - 3-D Sketch, Adobe Premiere, etc., but I think we came up with something pure. I'm sorry it's our only such collaboration. Kevin died a few years later, and I miss him terribly. I've held him close in my heart every step along my subsequent journey into interactive multimedia art, trying to live up to his inspiration and vision.

In 1992, we wired up a Mac to run Ovaltune, which converted the mouse's x/y position to MIDI notes while painting trails onscreen from imported graphics. You could link the graphics with specific sound banks, here on a Korg M1.It was the most pure example of my E=MC2 of Multimedia: "Any element of any kind of media can be used to change any other element of any other kind of media."Starts off as you might expect - angular, then morphs into... something else.In retrospect, it was the first iteration of the "musical paintbrush" seen in later products such as Kid Pix. We used it in live performance the following year.

A demonstration of "Never Mind the Broderbunds, Here's 21CA" by Frank Coleman of 21st Century Art (1993). The first independent CD-ROM.Members: Frank Coleman, John Chmaj, Karlo Takki, Tim Halle, Scott Matalon, Micro Vard, Kevin Foley, Jon Golden, Andrew Woolf.

Interactive art environment from 1993 using Macromedia Director and QuickTime. Unplayable for many years, resurrected as a video. From 21st Century Art (http://21ca.com).Additional technical information: QTVR was still a year away. This played pretty smoothly at the time. It was one big quicktime movie with a companion lookup table that preloaded the next set of frames (depending on where you were and which direction you were headed) and blitted them to the screen. I'd turn direct-to-stage on, so it would write directly to the video buffer, then off again and swapped out the QT movie for the requisite JPEG destination keyframe for the next scene.This was released on a CD-ROM so it ran on whatever the recommended spec of the time was. Probably 4MB RAM. Lingo is still the best scripting language I ever used, in my opinion. It's simplicity and readability by "normal people" is what gave it it's power. Some languages are so powerful that nobody can use them. 😉- FBC, NYC 2017

A blast from the past - a guided tour through my Code Library that I built for myself using Inspiration (http://inspiration.com), a deceptively simple visual organization program that maps well to the way my mind works. The code is Lingo (Macromedia / Adobe Director), circa 1996, (!) but the real point here is the way in which it's organized.

RETINABURN (1992) A "silent music video" I released in 1992, also billed as "the first interactive video for nightclubs." The idea is the visuals take on the mood of whatever music you play with it.This exploits an involuntary cognitive trick that our minds play on us when presented with two unrelated pieces of simultaneous media, which is to seek to make connections.I was working at Kodak in 1990 and after-hours, no-strings experimentation in the lab was encouraged. We got first crack at things like video cards that could output to VHS, and the Panasonic AG-1980, which made precision editing on S-VHS possible. Suddenly, the barrier to entry for making your own videos dropped to indie level and I was off like a shot.I'd also become obsessed with a PC fractal graphics program called Fractint, which allowed you to make your own, but even more importantly, "color cycle" and change palettes on the fly via keystrokes. Actual zooming animation wasn't available then, so I set out to make the most expressive thing I could with what I had.As such, it's one of the first videos to be made using computer graphics, and very much a product of its time, but somebody had to plant the flag. It got written up in Option and Psychotronic, which I was especially pleased about."Ray Vonne" was a colleague of mine in California, Dana Muscato (RIP), a former exec at Enigma Records who took a liking to me and got it played at raves and so forth, which was our goal.My favorite story about this was when Dana was playing it for some techno impressario and his crew. One of the flunkies said something disparaging, and the boss replied, "Oh yeah? How many have YOU made?" He also said he thought it had a sense of humor. I wish I knew who that was. He got it.#TBT #LegacyProject

Animation and music by Karlo Takki. Circa 1992.

I wrote my own program for my Roland V-Drums, using Macromedia Director and the Troikatronix MIDI extras, so that I could trigger and control images, videos and flash animations directly from the pads, with an interface that allowed me to easily map my musical performance to any visual accompaniment I wanted. I kept all the lookup tables and set lists in XML, so I could make changes on the fly with a text editor. Nowadays, this sort of thing comes in a can. Back then, everything had to be stitched together by hand. The demo says 2000, but it was really started around 1996.

My name is Frank Coleman, and I created the first interactive music site on the Internet. Here, at long last, is proof.I've been searching for a long time for as much concrete proof as I could find to support this assertion. It was October 30, 1995, coinciding with the release of the 1st version of Shockwave that supported two layers of audio, and it was for my brilliant, visionary friends, The Young Gods. I was on the Macromedia beta team, so I had early access to the technology.I have my original handwritten notes from when I was working out the design, and screens from the wayback machine that go back to '96, but earlier archives are lost.At last, thanks to Valentin Schmidt of the still-running Direct-L mailing list, I now have the original source files up and running on my desktop! My code still compiles error-free after nearly 30 years, mammajammas. 😉 Anyway, I feel like Georges Melies in HUGO, when they play his movies for him that he thought were lost forever.If you want to skip ahead to where I actually start playing the thing, it's a little after 00:17:00, but the preceding context is important the first time around, at least. I've salvaged all the code and will be publishing it, along with a deeper dive video on that later.Adobe wiped out 30 years of civilization when they deplatformed Shockwave, and later Flash. Companies should make their orphaned software open source!Referenced:The home page of my website in 1996, from the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/19961223175032/http://www.21ca.com/The Shockwave page that housed this when Shockwave was a thing. Now just an empty shell: https://web.archive.org/web/19961223175032/http://www.21ca.com/Macromedia Brings Multimedia To World Wide Web - October 30, 1995: https://web.archive.org/web/19990910043226/http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/1995/shockwave.htmlWired article from 1996: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/for-interactive-artist-its-lonely-on-the-edge/"Adobe Fandom" page on Shockwave: https://adobe.fandom.com/wiki/Adobe_Shockwave_PlayerShockwave end-of-life announcement: https://helpx.adobe.com/shockwave/shockwave-end-of-life-faq.htmlJohn Henry Thompson, the inventor of Lingo. http://www.johnhenrythompson.com/homeMore at https://frank-coleman.com . . . . #interactiveMusic #TheYoungGods #music #band #interactive #history #internet #first #industrial #Switzerland #Geneva #ivtv #21ca #21stCenturyArt #Macromedia #Director #Lingo #Adobe #rock #rockmusic #retro #90s #90stech #90sMultimedia #90sMusic #programming #Bryce #3D