Creativity, Entertainment and the Arts
Friday, November 12, 1999
2-3:15 p.m.

Johanna R. Drucker: ... but bigger and can't accommodate everybody who's waiting out in the hall, but it's a good sign I think to see that the interest in creativity is high during the e-Summit. I'm Johanna Drucker. I'm the Robertson Professor in Media Studies and I'm here to introduce our panelists and facilitate discussion this afternoon.

Digital media have made it clear to us that there are very few of the traditional disciplinary boundaries left and we're seeing digital media appear in every area of the sciences and the arts and the humanities and across the University in education, law, architecture, public policy, and business, and I think the reason for this is at the heart of what digital media are--code storage. That's the fundamental feature of digital video and what that means is that information can migrate from one environment to another morphing and mutating as it does so, and this is what's unique to the digital environment. Just as departments of mathematics and English have traditionally served as the places where attention can be paid to quantitative, discursive and expository forms that themselves appear across a wide variety of disciplines, so media studies will be the place to foster self-conscious critical reflection and applied research in the area of digital video.

Now, the participants in this panel on creativity and entertainment and the arts are representative of the ways all kind of other traditional boundaries are also being eroded, blurred, transformed in the electronic environment and certainly when we start to hear people speak here, we will see the ways in which art, fine arts and entertainment are no longer as clearly distinguished as they may have been at other times, that the realms of commercial and personal expression are having curious interactions with each other, and that all kinds of other sort of notions of what constitutes creativity are being transformed in the digital environment, and as I look across this group of panelists in each case this is embodied in how they're working and how they're thinking.

Let's start with Anna Robertson who's all the way at my left (to your right), at the end of the table and Anna's a fourth year student in history, English and American studies. She's also sort of the driving force and I use the word in the full meaning of it, behind the angle.com which is a on-line journal that is oriented towards a younger audience and her experience in that environment is certainly an example of the way in which digital media are transforming a traditional field in all kinds of ways that have encouraged her creativity to flourish.

Next to her is Ravi Krishnaswami and Ravi is a relatively recent grad of UVA. He works in electronic music and sound design for a company in New York City called Sacred Noise, but while he's also involved in sound design and composition and creative work and has his own band called Charming and has his second recording or disc work coming out from them, he also works in commercial work. He works in the sort of the daily bread and butter business of putting sound and music into a commercial environment and these things move back and forth in his experience.

Next to him we have Charles Ryan who's the Chief Financial Officer of iFilm which is an educational and distribution that deals with film on line and news production on line, and again, it's where's the line now between news and entertainment. We want to believe in these distinctions and we know that we encounter them and yet the industry platforms that enable these things, force different kinds of relations and different kinds of distinctions to be drawn in the new environment.

Immediately next to me is John Taylor who, along with Kelton Flinn who's sitting next to Bennett Simpson are co-founders of Kesmai and it's an on-line game company that works with an interactive environment in real time with multi-player on-line environments and again, it's interesting--when I looked at both of their resumes to think about in the background of Kelton Flinn and John Taylor we see robotics, we see computer science, and yet here they are working in the game industry and I keep thinking, yes, sportsmen, huntsmen. What does this mean in the game world? I wonder what their trophy rooms look like so that instead of having lions' heads held up, we have these things from Dungeons and Dragons in some kind of virtual holographic mode that decorate their walls, so I think we're going to see a little bit more of that today.

Immediately on my right is Bennett Simpson and Bennett is the senior editor of this journal, ArtByte, and in my experience (I come out of art history), ArtByte is a really interesting forum for the investigation and study of the impact of electronic of digital video on the find arts. It's an area that makes traditional art historians extremely nervous and young artists extremely excited, so ArtByte is at the cutting edge of some of these tensions and discussions.

Next to Kelton Flinn is Judith Shatin. Judith Shatin is a faculty member in the Music Department and again represents this interesting synthesis of the digital and traditional. Judith is both a composer and a faculty member. She works in electronic media and if you're lucky enough to be here tomorrow evening, at 8:15 in Old Cabell Hall Auditorium, there will be an evening of electronic music featuring one of Judith's compositions "Reeds." The event starts at 8:15 and will showcase some of the ways in which the University of Virginia has been involved with electronic music, and finally, at the far end of the table is Norman Adams, who is a student in Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering and also in the music area, and again, it's an example of the kind of student that we hope to see more and more of who takes a sophisticated technological base of expertise and brings it into a productive and generative dialogue with the arts.

On that note I shall stop and let my panelists speak. The format today will be that each of the invited guests, not our campus representatives, but invited guests will speak for five to seven minutes, give you some idea of what they're doing, and then we'll have some questions from the campus panelists and then a bit of discussion and open it to questions from you. If you don't mind because of the awkwardness of this room, if you have questions please write them on a piece of paper and pass them to this gentleman, Bob Chapel, who's sitting by the microphone--could you raise your hand just for a second--and he will read the questions out because we need the questions read into the microphone for the web cast and we don't want to ask you all to disturb yourselves and your neighbors to get to the microphone. John Taylor--

John Taylor: Thank you, Johanna. Good afternoon, everybody. Kesmai Corporation is the world leader in on-line multi-player games which basically means we bring people together on the Internet or American On-Line to play such games as poker, blackjack, combat simulations. We have fantasy role playing games. That sort of thing. Kesmai grew out of the experience that Kelton Flinn over there (you'll hear from him in a second) and I had in the late '70s at the University here when we were put in charge of the Engineering School computers. The E School had either the foresight or the recklessness to kind of put the hackers in charge of the computers and as a consequence, after all of the engineering students left which was about 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, that would leave us a fair amount of time to play with the computers, write games and have a good time.

Over the years that followed our time at the University of Virginia, we developed a relationship with a company called CompuServe which had a timesharing system not too unlike universities and they would charge people to use it and we said this is kind of neat. We've got these games that everyone seemed to love. Let's put them on CompuServe and see if someone will pay for it. They did. Eventually this little hobby of ours got bigger than my day job and Kelton finished his Ph.D. so we decided to make a business out of it and over other years we've managed to grow the company, and it's a local company in Charlottesville, a staff of about 100 people. We have about 475 people mostly in North America that are on line helpers and greeters and that sort of thing and now we're a wholly-owned division of Rupert Murdock's News Corporation so we have sister companies like 20th Century Fox and Harper Collins [laughter].

As part of our connection with News Corporation and 20th Century Fox, we have done a fair amount of work in the film and entertainment business. We've got several games. Aliens, for instance, based on the "Aliens" movies. Star Ship Troopers which actually, even though the movie was not all that popular, Star Ship Troopers is one of the most popular games on America On Line. Go figure, and also we have got an on-line game based on "Godzilla" which, again, seems to be doing a little bit better than the movie did, but that was a fascinating experience because we did a game that was a day-in-day release with the movie, so we had to work with the script. We got to see the secret pictures of Godzilla. That was exciting. Everyone had to deal with more security than the Manhattan Project to actually be able to see this silly lizard [laughter] and sorry, Mr. Devlin.

Anyway, as a consequence, there's been a lot of contact with our company with the filmed entertainment business and one of the things that I think is fascinating about the games industry is it's actually bigger than the film industry. Last year, the games business did about $12 billion. The games industry in North America and filmed entertainment was about $8 billion, so most people think games are for kids. Well, we're talking serious business here. The Dreamcast, which is Sega's new console, generated more dollars in its opening weekend than did the "Phantom Menace" just to sort of put things in perspective now. The other thing I wanted to mention is the top selling PC game today is a game called "Age of Empires" and the designer of that game, Bruce Shelley, is also a UVA grad in our class, actually, so we have sort of got in the games industry a fairly good representation of Wahoos which I think is just fantastic.

What I want to do now is show a 60-second video which will show a little bit of game play. I apologize. It's a little bit marketing, but it's not going to last too long, hopefully. This is talking about "Game Storm" which is our Internet game brand. [Audio of video is indecipherable.] Thank you. You can stop it there.

One thing I want to say is this is all about creativity and what we find over the years is creativity has got a lot of different forms. Certainly as you've seen, the audiovisual aspects can be highly creative in this industry. Software, and my background is software, the software is extremely creative. It's a challenging effort to get 10,000 people connected to some kind of server complex playing a game in the same area, so there is a lot of creativity in the software development area. The whole concept of the community that surrounds these games, you have to think about things in a different way. How do you get this many people to play nice together? I think Kelton's going to talk about that a little bit and also game design. How do you build a game that people will play and play remotely? And when I was thinking about the e-Summit and what I wanted to try to leave people with, one of the things that happened to me while I was at the University of Virginia foreshadowed this entire industry.

I was second year and we were playing a computer game with some people at George Mason, so we were playing remotely with this group of people and playing Star Trek and I had a teammate, Marty, who was a [Romulun] with me and we played and we played. We had this good time and after I guess it was about two months, there was a field trip, so to speak, from George Mason here for a big party and I met Marty for the first time and I was absolutely shocked. A, Marty was a woman. B, Marty was deaf. She could not hear, and she was also incredibly shy, and I had no idea. I had no preconceived notions about this particular woman, and that is just the fantastic power that the Internet brings. You don't have preconceived notions about who you're playing with. You don't make stereotypical assumptions about people and you can play games that you could never play anywhere. You can't get into military situations with 500 people in any other kind of situation and it's a fantastic power for creativity.

Kelton F. Flinn: Thanks for the introduction, John. Since John did a good job of telling you about Kesmai and what we do, I'm going to talk a little bit about creativity and in our industry or one of the challenges that we face. I was always interested in creating multi-player games even while I was here at the University as some people in the room here can attest that I would rather do that than my class work. At Kesmai, we've done a variety of different computer games. Essentially one of every kind of game except for a sports game, although we do now have a golf game.

The on-line world provided us a real avenue for creativity and that's been a lot of fun, but what makes on-line games work is not our creativity. It's the creativity of the players. That's what the true appeal of on-line games is. You create a world, maybe it's a fantasy world, maybe science fiction, maybe even an historical simulation like our World War II game and you start telling your story--what you want the players to learn, but when you put the real people in, everything changes. The players are creating their own stories and you can't really even guide them very much. You quickly find that in a truly successful on-line world you don't own it. The players own it.

For example, in our fantasy game, [Tom'll] appreciate this one. In our fantasy game, we created a very powerful dragon. We put him in a carefully crafted magical lair. We tried to make him the most fearsome dragon that ever existed. Now, that's traditional creativity. We were the artists. We were making a dragon and we were trying to impress people. That was fun, but the real fun was watching the players slay the poor dragon over and over and over. Everything we tried, the players were clever. They'd build magical traps for the dragon using techniques we'd never dreamed of when we designed the game. Once they even resurrected the dragon they'd just killed and confused it into attacking the next dragon that came along and they watched the dragons fight [laughter]. Each of these exploits was memorialized in the bulletin boards that CompuServe maintained outside the game and so the game built its own lore and the lore grew with the telling. That was the real fun for the players.

When we started out, our goal was to create the best computer game ever written and that's a humble goal. I guess it's suiting of UVA graduates, and this business of it's not our game. It's their's came as kind of a painful discovery and it's something that took a lot of getting used to. After all, we were the creators; they weren't. Some game designers fight tooth and nail to retain control over their game, but that's really missing the point of what makes on-line games different from other experiences.

I'll give you an example. Air War, our World War II flight simulator, came out in 1987. Kesmai had no artists on staff. We had only had three people at the beginning and so the game debuted with some very primitive art work that I drew and it was not good, although it did show up in a magazine once. One of the players reverse engineered the art file. It was on MacIntosh. It was pretty easy to do. He reversed engineered the file and he started uploading much better art work than what I had. Well, it's pretty cool. We liked it and so we capitalized on it and made a virtue of necessity and we enabled the players to create art work for the game and then, of course, they immediately got into it in a big way and they created the look and feel of the game really.

Well, then we got some major funding from a company in Japan and we were going to do a professional version of the game. We did professional art work that was really high quality and the programmer who was working on it said, well, we've paid all this money for this art work. There is no way we're going to let the players modify it so he put in all kinds of fancy encryption and we put it out there and it wasn't too long before one of the players cracked the encryption and uploaded a DOS utility he written and mailed people to take apart the art files and change them. Well, there was an explosion of player creativity. A lot of what they did was not as good as what we've done. Some of it was close. Some of it was junk and some of it was even cheating like cutting holes in the bottom of their planes so they could look down and see what was below them [laughter], but it was theirs and they owned it and as a result, they really got into the game. I think it's key to harness the players' creativity so they can enhance the experience. It's not just us. It's them. And that's something that's possible in the on-line media that's difficult or impossible in traditional media.

I look forward to the technological improvements because better graphics and faster networks make it possible to produce much more interesting games. And the closer the on-line gaming experience approach is to the impact of movies or television the more people will get interested in and the more approachable it will be, but to make it a really different experience than traditional media, we have to find a way to let all those creative people interact with each other instead of just being acted upon by the creators or us.

Today unfortunately, the audience has to be technically savvy to contribute to the community. For instance, drawing art work is a technical skill. You've got to have the programs, the software, the training. We need to find ways to use technology to make contributing to the on-line community something that's a part of the game, something that's automatic. You do something interesting in the game, and a new story appears and all the other players can enjoy it, so everybody's creative and everybody's contributing without having to go out of their way. That's our challenge for the future.

Johanna Drucker: Thank you. Ravi--

Ravi Krishnaswami: Hi. I had a few things I was going to talk about that I just ditched in the last 10 minutes, but I guess I should tell a little bit about Sacred Noise because it's a small company and it's something that a lot of people probably don't really think about when they turn on the TV that you get bombarded by this media-scape of advertising and for every ad there's sound, there's music, and in many cases it's not just music in the background that's not really doing anything. It's actually very thought out, very engineered to grab a certain person's ear when you're watching television, very specifically engineered towards demographics. A lot of times it's specifically scored to the cuts of the picture and this is something that's kind of exploded in the last few years, I think because of the proliferation of editing facilities which has become so cheap that a lot of companies can afford to have very flashy looking commercials and to accompany these flashy looking commercials half the battle is to have flashy impactful sound. That's what we do is the advertisers come to us. They have a picture. They're trying to advertise something and they need that sound to grab people and although the sound is often thought of afterwards at the very end of the process, it's sometimes just as important.

So what I do is I'm a composer. I write music and I create sound design and I got my start here working in the computer music laboratory, the VCCM as a music major learning a digital audio work station which is basically an all-in-one kind of set up where you can really create almost anything if you think of it and if you have the right tools, if you have enough synthesizers. You can almost create anything and I got up to New York and I started working for this company and I was about four years younger than every other composer there and I just started working on my stuff at night and this demo came along and they needed really young music, techno music, and the older composers just weren't creating pieces of music that were catching the ear of the advertisers and I went in and I wrote a demo and the rest is history, so I think I'll play a couple of examples now of some stuff I've done over the last year and then maybe talk a little bit more about how the digital audio work station and how the technology of recording music has made this just a totally intense exciting place to be where you go in every day and you're starting from scratch and creating something huge and so I guess we can roll it. The sound's probably not going to be very good, but try to imagine it. [Audio indecipherable]

So, those are a few examples. One thing you might have noticed if you were listening closely, which I don't expect you to do, but there's a lot of stuff in there that's very non-literal sound design. You see something happening in the picture and then you hear something that's not the exact sound of that event, but it's some other sound that meant to link your eye to that and also make the picture more interesting than it is. In fact, this is a little side note, but a lot of the times the music company is like the savior of the commercial if the ad people are not happy with their visuals because they shoot everything first. They edit it, and they're done. They can't go back and reshoot it. That's like three-quarters of their budget so they come to us saying, look, we got this commercial. It's got to be interesting. Do something with it and that's it.

I think on the topic of creativity, what I could talk about is that this business has been around for years, and the technology in some ways is only just an evolving tool that we use as musicians and as sound designers, but what's exciting about the way I work on a computer right now scoring and doing sound design is how it's really accelerated the creative process almost to an absurd rate actually where the computer can do everything so quickly, you have so many options that it's really as soon as you think of it whereas maybe 5, 10 years ago, you wrote the piece of music. You hired the players. You brought them in. The process was much more relaxed. There were less expectations from the advertisers. Now, it's you go in and everything's got to be super fantastic blow your mind in about five hours after they give you the tape and the computer lets you do that and that's the trick, that's the gig.

I learned this software called Digital Performer at UVA which is an all-in-one hard disc recording sequencing program and in this program you can basically compose, you can record all your audio into the program, you can edit it to however many iterations of the track you want. You can keep track of all your different versions and you can pretty much do anything you want and then with the addition of the digital media of the DSP sound process which I have now on my computer which in layman's terms is I have a lot of plugs in on my sequencer and if anybody's played around with an audio program is starting to learn about plug in, it's basically digitally altering your sound and those plug ins are key because they want sounds that are impactful and cut through and they've never heard before and everybody's heard a violin pluck before, but if you take it and you bring it into the computer and you do something different with it, and then you put it in an odd place because you can just drag it right across the screen, suddenly you're creating all of these different possibilities in a very short space of time and what's fascinating about my job is that there may be three or four people who would be doing what I'm doing now and this is kind of standard in the business. I'm an engineer. I'm a composer. I'm a keyboard player, a guitar player, an arranger, a copyist. I'm all of these functions in one person and that's pretty much what the computer, the digital audio work station, I think has done to this business.

It's getting to the point where I think five years from now not only are you going to be able to do that all on your computer, but it's going to be so affordable that somebody can have their computer at home loaded up with software, synthesizers, and software samplers and basically have a recording studio on their desk and that's going to even, I think, break down the barriers even more from it being an operation of four or five people down to an operation of one person with an expensive set up down an operation of one person in their bedroom which is pretty much where it's going and the danger I see in the digital audio work station in the creative process is that a lot of advertising clients don't understand creativity. They go in and they want they want. They want it better than the last campaign. They want it to sound better than this spot and they don't really-- I don't want to totally trash talk ad people this afternoon [laughter].

__________: They pay the bills

Krishnaswami: Right. They pay my rent, but they don't respect the creative process and what happens with the technology being at this accelerated pace now is that they don't understand time restraints. There's no technological parachute in your schedule. You can't say I'm sorry it's going to take us an hour to get an engineer over here to do this. Now, it's boom boom boom and really the only thing slowing you down is yourself and that can be a very scary place to be at your job where you feel like I can't think fast enough to do this. And that's the danger I see, but I think the benefits obviously outweigh these dangers in that it's opening it up for everybody to get involved in making music and making sound and you don't have to have access to a very expensive recording studio anymore, so I guess anything else I have to say would be in the question and answer period, but that's my gig.

The one thing that I can say about the Internet now is that with MP3 technology it's going to be a very interesting field in about five years how we manage our archive of unsold music and make it available to people on line and the business could be totally shifting in five years now. Right now we're on the precipice and I'm like one of the two people in my company who actually goes on the Internet at all, so we're far behind in that respect but it could be turning around in a few years. So, that's it.

Johanna Drucker: Thank you. Bennett--

Bennett M. Simpson: I was sitting here listening to Ravi talk and to the other panelists talk and after this morning's plenary session, and I thought that there's not one aspect of this conference that wouldn't be a perfect story in ArtByte which is weird because we're an art magazine. We started as an art magazine. We started as a very very specialized specific kind of art magazine which is we came out of the digital print world which if anybody knows the art world is an incredible rarified strange little corner. We covered new printing technology and artists that worked in print media. We quickly discovered that that wasn't going to anywhere at least outside of its box and so we went from ArtByte, the magazine of digital arts which was very sort of specific applied notion, to ArtByte, the magazine of digital culture which is like going from one extreme to the other. It's a very vague notion now, but it allows us to cover any number of things. We're a bi-monthly magazine. We've been out for two years, and at this point, we do cover sound design. We do cover gaming. We cover new media and all its aspects, from the business end to the design end, and we still cover a lot of digital art.

It's interesting being a magazine, an art magazine, that covers digital technology in the art world because the commercial gallery contemporary art world in New York, Los Angeles, London, where-have-you, is still incredibly reluctant to embrace digital technology in many ways, not even reluctant but hostile to the idea [laughter], and there're so many reasons for this, but one of the biggest reasons is because there's still a very ingrained distinction made between fine art and applied art and fine art is up on the mountain top--inspiration, imagination. It's the unique art object. It's the artist doing his thing in his garret. The painter slaving away. The sculptor in the gallery, what-have-you, and applied art is sound design or game design or web design and this is a totally silly distinction at this point, but it's one that's totally upheld at the same time.

ArtByte sometimes in a very prescient and smart way runs roughshod over all of that. Sometimes we just sort of flounder about and make a lot of wild assertions and interesting points and everything, but it puts us in a interesting position in New York because the art magazine hierarchy there sort of wants to recognize us because they know the digital technology Internet's very hot. They know that they see a lot of .com commercials on TV.

I was talking to a gallery director the other day and her daughter works for a web company who's doing-- It's kind of an advertising company but they do a lot of advertising for E-trade or for a lot of the new .com start-ups and I expressed interest in this and I said I actually just wrote an article about on line .com advertising and about how those commercials are designed and how we come to see this industry, and she said, "well, why on earth would you do this? You're an art magazine." I said, "well, because this new economy that people are talking about or this new Internet world has to look like something. It has to represent itself somehow," and I think in the most general sense, that's what ArtByte is interested in is how this new technology represents itself, how it makes itself look, and that makes things as open-ended and as fun as possible, I think.

What is Metcalf's law? Metcalf's law is like the more people you have on a network, the more powerful the network is. I'm sure there's some mathematicians here. We love that at ArtByte and so we try to draw on as many people in this new world as possible and I think from the critical reception that we've got in the past year and a half, two years, we're kind of onto something and it'll be very interesting to see what happens.

There're digital media magazines starting up every day. There're three that have started in New York in the past six months and that makes us feel like we're kind of doing something interesting.

Johanna Drucker: Okay. Charlie Ryan.

Charles F. Ryan III: What I'm going to talk about a little bit is a company called iFilm which is a start-up company that's been around for about seven months and I think what it's going to do is it's going to show you that number one, there is creativity in the video space. There's also changing dynamics in the movie, movie production and movie distribution business and then also how do we apply creativity down really to the individual.

You've also seen the Quest commercial. Every movie ever made in every language. The guys pulls off the side of a road at sort of a small hotel and he says what kind of entertainment do you have. This is the vision. It's a very very broad and vast vision and I'll talk a little bit about that, but that's sort of where we're looking to go and we expect to go, so what is iFilm. It's the largest database of on-demand films on the Internet, over a thousand films primarily short films and content right now. Nobody wants to sit at their computer and watch a two-hour movie. Not only that, but most people don't even have a 56K connection, so it's so slow that the streaming media on there is not even motion half the time. It's just stills, but I can talk a little bit about that.

And then we're a film community. We've talked about personalization. We've talking about making a community and adding value by providing personalization and value added to people, so by going after film makers, consumers and film industry professionals, we believe that we can bring together a film-making community that satisfied all three constituents.

I'm going to run through this really quickly. We look at it as consumers by convenience and choice for personal viewing. Now, it's not necessarily home video but it's personal viewing. It could be at some point in time in the future on palm tops, on whatever, but again, it's convenience and choice. The primary issue right now is the going to be the proliferation and the adoption of broadband. Broadband is going to really drive content on the Internet, particularly video content, and so as you see DSL roll out-- I was reading this morning. I think Bell South is talking about rolling out DSL next year to 18.5 million customers, so as you see that, and you see those broadband connections, you're going to start to see significantly more video content coming to the Internet and hopefully what you'll begin to see is also a transition from watching different types of video content on your PC ultimately transition to the television set. It's not much, for example, for a Sony to build a digital television set with the disc drive in it that then you could download a movie to that and then see it. You see TVO and replay now which enables you to play video off of broadcast, so we'll see that.

And the last thing I think is there's really it's a nation kind of segment in terms of the video on the Internet so really there's nobody out there right now that's sort of controlling this.

Quickly, three strategies for how somebody sort of competes in this going forward. There're going to be companies that are either going to own or produce the content. Obviously, major studios, distributors. You're going to own the network infrastructure, Covad, AT&T, and then it's owning the audience. I don't see that we own the audience, but what we're trying to do is we're trying to amass an audience by providing a community which then enables us to leverage and get more content and ultimately you have a virtual cycle to provide a viewing experience I think everybody's going to be excited about.

So, what's our model? We're going to partner for content and really what we're talking about is enabling a new distribution medium for film makers fundamentally and ultimately later down the line, I don't think it's going to be three years or five years. I don't know. I think it'll be sooner than that. I think it's going to be dependent upon how quickly broadband really does penetrate but it really is enabling a new distribution mechanism for consumers. Who knows? At some point in time you may not drive up to the corner video store and buy or rent a video. All you've got to do is hit a button and download it into your TV. You sit down and you watch your TV and there it is, so, again, it's a choice and value.

Again, in any kind of site like this you have to drive traffic so it's really driving traffic by focusing on the user experience, and finally, I'm not sure how many of you are familiar or comfortable with the Hollywood studio system, but there're certain inefficiencies of how you track scripts, how you do coverage, how you track productions, etc., that there'll be significant ability for us to also apply some of the database techniques that we're using here.

This, I think, captures what iFilm is. As I said, community. It's film makers, consumers, and industry professionals, so we're dealing with convenience of value. It brings them to the site and then personalization and service keeps them loyal, keeps them there, so we're going to provide-- For film makers, we're going to provide news, exposure, feedback. We've already had two or three directors of short film content on the site get directing jobs now in Hollywood, so we're enabling film makers to get instant distribution and we're sharing revenue with the film maker. We are not trying to buy exclusive rights and then cut the film maker out. We're really trying to enable the film maker.

The second thing we're providing is sort of quick short DVD run so, again, we're trying to reduce the cost for the film maker to gain exposure either through an Internet window or even through a short DVD run they might send out to people.

Consumers, again--we're providing content, reviews, My iFilm, just like My Yahoo! etc. discussion groups so, again, there's a significant amount of news and content that you'll be able to provide for people, and finally, industry professionals. We have another site iFilmpro which is for industry professionals which provides tracking board, script tracking boards, production tracking, buzz, etc., so that now you're able to tie in talent agents, management agencies, and the other industry professionals in Hollywood, so you really do now create a community surrounded around film.

I think if you had to say what does this really mean. If you took it from a log line. I'm not sure how many of you know what a log line is in Hollywood but typically it is a one-sentence which describes your movie. Well, if we were thinking about iFilm we would think of it as sort of as CNET which is the vertical of technology meets geocities, so it's the community of film on the Internet.

And then I'm going to show a really quick __________ and take it now from this is sort of how we're changing what's going on on the Internet and film and then as Ravi was talking about, I think it's the expectation of five years to be able to provide some of these digital or audio editing tools to consumers. I think it's here sooner than you think and I'm going to show you a quick demonstration of that. This is what call the iFilm digital video sampler. What this does it's able to take any AVI, any audio video that somebody shoots and it captures it and parses into 10 subsegments and when I load the video into it, what I'm going to be able to do then is I'm going to be able to manipulate any of those segments at random, at will, in a very different format, so now I become a digital video artists. It's much like a rapper with a record. I can do this same thing. Now, let me load something up there and I'll show you what--

All of you are probably familiar with Ally McBeal. You're probably also familiar with the dancing baby. Well, here's the dancing baby and now what I'm able to do is I'm able to take the video and by different key strokes on the keyboard (it's a lot better with sound), but I'm able to manipulate it in any way I want and if I had sound, then I could actually do a little rapping and I could get some rhythm going, but unfortunately I don't. So this, again, it allows me to take all the video, take it into 10 pieces and now I can actually manipulate it randomly myself just by doing keyboard so now you can set up and this also has music put into it, so this is something that I think you would like and then we also have--

Really, the future of this is to be able to network this, so then you could network this and you could amongst a number of different users and a number of different types of backgrounds and video and you begin to create an interactive cooperative type of new creative experience, and this is a sort of watered-down consumer version which I think we'll be releasing hopefully shortly for download. The other thing that we will have is also a professional version which I think will be something that Ravi would like where he's able to do the multitude of sort of creative talents that you've been able to demonstrate over the years, so I think it's the five years that we talked about. I don't think it's five years before we have some of this technology that's available to us today.

Johanna Drucker: Great. I'm going to turn then first to my campus participants and I thought I'd ask Judith Shatin and then Norman Adams and Anna Robertson each to comment in turn or make their own contribution and then have some panel questions and conversation. Judith--

Judith Shatin: I think I'll start by telling you that when I founded the Virginia Center for Computer Music in 1987 the idea that Ravi would be coming along a few years down and learn what he has and been able to put it to the kind of use he had, didn't really occur to me nor did it occur to me that some of our students would wind up working for Kesmai Corporation, but what happened was that it seemed to be a wonderful opportunity to think about new ways of creating sound, new ways of thinking about it and in it. It seemed really like an exciting experimental new world to explore and I didn't think then and I don't know that it's a world that precludes our enjoyment and pleasure and expansion of the world of music and art in its more traditional sense and, for example, tomorrow evening on our technosonics program which is actually the third day of our festival here, we have an internationally known violinist Mari Kimura for the Juillard School who'll be playing a [zeda] violin which is a violin that's wired up so that it can actually send messages to a computer and have the computer transform the sound interactively, so I think what we're seeing is just this incredible expansion of possibility with a range going from expanding what the traditional opportunities were to all kinds of new activities of the sort that you've been hearing about and new modes of creative and artistic thought that aren't possible in other way.

For example, a couple of my colleagues and I were recently talking about what Internet 2 may make possible and we came up with the idea of trying to create pieces of music which would be performed in one place and processed differently at multiple sites so that you would actually have a work that winds up being a multitude of works and that people would perceive differently in different places and one of my other colleagues was telling me about a recent piece he did where he was playing on a keyboard in New York and it was being processed by and listened to in Tokyo and these kinds of interactions that enable people to bring to bear such different kinds of ideas and creativity are really fascinating.

I'd also like to say just a couple of things about this issue of entertainment, art, how they merge, where they merge and it seems to me that they really drive each other. If I think back to the beginnings of the computer manipulation of sound and electronic sound, part of it came out of pop musicians who were very discouraged because in the early days, electronic keyboards, if you played one key you got one note and they wanted chords, so you may remember seeing banks of keyboards. Well, the idea was they wanted chords and so out of that developed the technology to have multiltimbrel synthesizers and out of that developed a lot more experimentation and one of the things that I think on the other side about doing this kind of work that a University such as UVA that's really important is the notion of open source, open information that can be shared by communities of users around the world, and one of the things we've been excited about is using the new Lennox platform and developing a number of different kinds of computer music tools to transform sound, to enable you to do what Ravi was describing and use your imagination and be able to actually have it come into reality very quickly, but what's exciting is having a whole community of users around the world participating in this, so you're not limited to your frustration, although many of the off-the-shelf programs he was mentioning--digital performer--they're terrific, but you can't get in there and change them, but with these community based programs that you have people contributing much the same way he was describing the game players.

You can really invent in endless ways and people can make it their own, so I think what I'd like to leave you with from my perspective and what I've heard here today is the incredible breadth of opportunity and different kinds of creativity that people are bringing to bear on this and we don't know where it's going and I think that's one of the really terrific things about it. I remember recently hearing a former professor of mine who had over a decade ago started a computer music LAN which was called CMIX. That is now in very wide use, and one of his students decided, well, this is an interesting program, but I have to spend a lot of time in order to get any results and so one of his students decided to make it a real time program and he told the student it couldn't be done. Well, it's not only been done, but we're collaborating with this person at the University of Virginia to amplify the possibilities, so I think what's exciting is all of these options and many different kinds of developments and not necessarily knowing where we are going next.

Johanna Drucker: Norman, would you like to make a few comments?

Norman H. Adams: Yes, sure. I guess this is geared towards the entire group although I guess Ravi in particular just because you mentioned experience with the music industry. A couple of years ago I read an article that was predicting in a decade or so we wouldn't really be buying music anymore. We wouldn't be buying music media and no CDs, no tapes. We'd just be renting it. We'd pay two cents to get the latest Madonna single, listen to it off the net once and then get rid of it, and so this started to present the interesting situation of not so much hurting the act of creativity but hurting the act of appreciating creativity and if you were only renting things and you never really buy anything and really listen to it in depth, how much of great art would you really be appreciating, and so while this certainly sort of does seem to be going on, things seem to be moving in this direction with e-commerce and all and such, at the same time, the technology of creating music and such is making it much easier, much much easier to make music yourself, like ridiculous how simple it is to turn on your latest mini sequencer and create just wonderful sounding things very simply and so the situation is arising where you start to wonder why bother listening to other peoples' music at all when you can just create your own [laughter] and it's getting to be that easy.

__________: Close, yeah.

Adams: Well, not necessarily. You pull up arpeggios and little functions and the algorithm will make the sound for you. I mean, last year a friend of mine was demonstrating a techno algorithm. You just pulled up like a half dozen numbers on a screen and you just started to modify them and these little blips and blups would start coming from the computer and it started to sound marvelous and like melodic and tonal and then at times it would get dissonant and crazy. I had no idea what these parameters were doing. You're just randomly tweaking them until you found something you kind of liked and so it's presenting me with this question of the real art then is in the creation of the algorithm, the thing that everyone's going to be using to generate these sounds and I think my concern is for like the educational world to start paying more attention to this. The tools and the algorithms that are used are very very important to how we understand creativity. Techno wouldn't have happened if Roland hadn't introduced that TR drum machine some number of years ago. The whole techno culture would have never gotten started and yet it happened and so, well, did some other technology not happen and so we're missing out on some great music mecca because of this? And so it's just an interesting concern that the gap between art and technology has always been kind of big and so now that it's shrinking, I think we have to make a real effort to really merge them so that way people can work. I don't know, make the algorithms more creative. I guess that's all.

Johanna Drucker: Okay. Thank you. Anna, let's hear from you and then we'll open it to the panel.

Anna S. Robertson: I guess I come from a very different perspective, definitely more localized and I come from more of a journalistic perspective. We started an on-line news magazine about a year ago in December and we started it because we wanted to offer a different outlet for people, for students, mainly journalistically was what I was thinking for writing rather than the daily newspaper or some of the other outlets on Grounds and we thought that an electronic journal would be the best way to do it because it was kind of cutting edge and it'd be a new challenge and I'm just amazed since then to see how much it's grown and how much creativity has been invested in this project and not necessarily in the product but as somebody who's watched it grow as looking at the creativity of expanding your mind and even just the people who've been involved in it, just stretching your mind in a little bit different way to think about how you can make things more creative.

We originally just were putting stories on the web and now we've kind of enlisted an entire team for the digital arts classes. We have a whole graphics team that creates graphics and we've started doing a lot of a photo galleries. We've gotten a team from the Engineering School who does polls and makes things more interactive. We have a message board and we're constantly thinking when we have a story or we have something, a big piece, that we really want to feature how can we make this interactive, how can we make this creative, and I think that there's just so much out there as everybody's been saying that it's hard to just call it a day on the Internet because there's always something better you can do. There's always another picture you can add or a time line or a photo gallery or an audio clip or a sound clip and it's really exciting to hear whatever here is saying as far as getting film, getting sound, getting all of these things to work really well on the Internet.

Right now, of course, there's some stumbling blocks. We've run up against a lot of barriers sometimes in being creative in the arts. We want to do flash animation pieces on our web site and a lot of times people can't download them or if people aren't on Grounds looking at our site, it takes a long time to download the pictures from a photo gallery and sometimes that kind of impedes the creative process, and same thing with audio and visual. I just don't think-- You listen to it and you listen to an audio track on the web or a video track and sometimes it still just doesn't sound quite the way that you want it to, so I think that's one area where, sure, we're going to have these technologies but we do need to be thinking realistically about the people at home who are going to be appreciating this and how we can make things more accessible to them. I just think it's a really exciting opportunity to broaden your mind by looking at how everything is connected and how many components you can add to a certain story or idea.

Johanna Drucker: Well, I'd like to open this now to the panelists to see if they have some comments or questions for each other. We've heard quite a wide range of presentations here and I hear a lot of different themes, but I won't put them forward. I'll let you all see if you have comments for each other first. Would you like to be prompted with a question? [laughter] And those of you out there who think you have questions should start writing them now and passing them to Bob Chapel, but let me just ask you one question that come to mind as I'm listening to all of you and that is I hear over and over again and perhaps it's my own wishful thinking, but I hear the desire to see technology as a skill base really integrated into artistic and creative processes at the educational level and I just wonder if each of you could comment a little bit on how you would see that and how it would have an impact on your own industry or your own profession and even be as concrete as you'd like or as speculative as you would like to be. And I'm not going to limit this to our invited guests. Anyone sitting at the podium please should comment on this.

Taylor: Well, I'll take a little stab at that. One of the things that I think the Engineering School at the University of Virginia has always done phenomenally well is is expose poor toolies to the humanities and the humanities classes that I took while in engineering quite frankly, the writing skills, the communication skills, how I use those today, the electrical engineering skills that I learned, well, they're obsolete [laughter], but I learned how to think and I learned how to write and I think in the technological society that we're moving into, the opposite should also be true--that the liberal arts education needs to have some technology. I'm not talking about a major crash course on how to program computers, but you need to know enough to not be afraid of them. You need to know enough to understand the technology. You don't really have to know exactly how it works, but you have to have an appreciation of how to use it and I think that should be a fundamental part of any education going forward just as foreign languages (I guess this was mentioned earlier). Foreign languages have always been an important part of a broad education. Technology should as well.

Shatin: I'd like to second that and just to say that in our Music Department here we have recently revised our major and all of our students now need to take at least one course that involves creativity in music and most of them elect to take a course in introduction to computers and music and we're really trying to integrate this throughout our curriculum because of just exactly those reasons. We want people to be literate and also to have their imaginations prompted to be able to move in these new directions. I agree. I think it's critical and that's why we've taken that step.

Krishnaswami: One of the things I've found at UVA was the introduction to technology while I was here at UVA was second to none so that I had available the latest technology and I just integrated it quickly into my own life and my own education, and then you take that forward, so again, it's access and I think UVA does a great job at that, of providing people with access to latest technology. I think that needs to continue.

You can look a technology education whether it's in the E School or you can look at technology education of making tools available for people to take advantage of, so there's really different ways to think about it, but I think that there has to be some integration and then people will have their own, I think. interests whether or not they really get deeply into technology or not, but the basic fundamental tools have to be there.

Simpson: I'd like to sort of respond to that and also to some comments that Norman had earlier. He was talking about how important these algorithms are for making techno music and it just keyed off to me what was great about my introduction to electronic music here a few years ago was the open mind that my teachers had regarding popular music, especially stuff like dance music and hip hop which is very much based in technology and it's sample-based music. It's based on sequencing and as a part of our culture, this popular music, I mean, it seems like it's easy in a course of music study to try to focus in on more traditional aspects of harmony and I won't even get into it, but the idea that we had this open creative discussion and creation of music using technology was what really allowed me to pick up that style of music very quickly and understand it and also be able to step away from it and I think it's very important, especially in the Music Department that it keeps that link to popular music there so nobody feels alienated like, okay, I'm going to be a music major. That means I've got to go listen to a bunch of classical CDs and a bunch of jazz CDs and write this many papers and ignore the fact that I listen to this hip hop record or this dance record and I think the validation of those processes which are more based in technology is great and should keep going full force.

My background's not in technology at all. I was always a literature person, and even working at this magazine which is ostensibly about digital technology and digital media. I don't have the hands-on sort of tech skills that a lot of you all have, but in a way it doesn't matter for me, but it is-- I love this idea that the art is in the algorithm and because it is. An algorithm is just a way of making something happen. It's a kind of design and no matter what you're dealing with, whether it's music or corporate logo or an ad campaign or a painting that you're dealing with designs. You're dealing with codes. You're dealing with ways of thinking about making things look a certain way, and that is something that has really sort of been brought to the forefront by new technology and that's I think where a lot of artists that aren't trained in technology could benefit from exposure to technology. Just being forced to think about how they're making something look, how they're doing that, and forced to think about algorithms and designs and codes and I think this is crucial across the board for people that are on the tech side of things or on the humanities sides of things. I think that UVA does a very good job of stressing that actually with programs like IF.

Johanna Drucker: I would just second that by saying that I think we could take this in a whole nother direction by emphasizing creativity as a part of the curriculum so that in fact the notion of art and form giving become part of the fundamentals of the Engineering School as well, and I think that as we push this vision forward, we want to be thinking in those kinds of ways so that the dialogue is really a dialogue, but I think it'd be interesting to hear what kinds of questions have come from the audience, so Bob Chapel.

Bob Chapel: Okay, the first one is for John Taylor and Kelton Flinn. How do you feel about putting creativity towards violence and games of war and what do you think about the dialogue about how media may contribute to violence among children?

Taylor: I'll take a little crack at that. In the games industry, there's a wide span of products. There are some extremely violent games that constitute somewhat less than 3_% of the entire market share of games. The majority of games that people play are not violent. Now, that said, the companies that have gotten some extremely bad press about their ultra-violent games, they've actually gone out of business. The market forces are driving these people out. Now, that said, some games are competitive in the sense of traditional competition--poker, those kinds of games. Fantasy role-playing games may have a little bit more violence. Again, no more or less depending on how much the graphic artists wants to put in there and as the mass market becomes important to these products, you can't shock too much nor can you have it too dull, and some of our games, for instance, are military simulations which are in some sense the epitome of true violence. However, again, most of the work that we do is not the sort of up-close violence that has gotten so much bad press. It's more of a military maneuver kind of stuff.

Flinn: I'll expand on that last point a little bit. Our best known game really is Air War and it's World War II flight simulation. You can't really get a whole lot more directly into war than shooting down another player but that's not really what the game's all about. What the game's all about is the camaraderie and it's also about the history. What we found is that I started just writing these games with airplanes in them and we put them up on line and we got people who were playing the game. The next thing I knew we were going to air shows. We were meeting World War II veterans. We were reading all the books. We're were practically living the "Saving Private Ryan" community years before it happened because of the community that we created in the game, and that's really been our focus in all of our games is building that community and the players instead of being bloodthirsty Mongols. They're actually tremendously respectful of the veterans that they meet and so on. It changes the way a lot of the players, it's changed the way they looked at history. There's a real educational opportunity in some of these games but it's subtle education. It's not something that we're bludgeoning them--you're going to learn history. They want to do it because they're getting into the experience.

Johanna Drucker: I think we have time for one more short question if you can find one that you think somebody can make a good final remark. We're about to run out of time but it shows that we need another summit that will deal with the e-technology and the arts.

Bob Chapel: Well, all right, for Ravi then. What is MP3 technology? What is DSL and broadband? And can it transfer video content at the same quality as TV? You've got three minutes, Ravi.

Johanna Drucker: No, actually 1_ minutes.

Krishnaswami: MP3 technology is the latest craze. It's a way to compress digital audio from a high file size which would be what you get on a CD down to a much lower file size which is something you can manage to send to people across the Internet. It's just taking off everywhere. People are using it to send each other music. They're using it to store all their music on one hard drive and play it off the hard drive as like a jukebox. There's a lot of issues with pirating and stuff, but it looks like it could be the future of distribution for the music industry in some way. It sounds pretty good to my ear when you encode at the right level and at my company we use it now. We save $25.00 every time we use it because usually we lay down a track, put it on a DAT, put it in a FedEx, it gets there the next day. It's $25.00 down the drain. Now, we just e-mail file to somebody, so I think that answers that. It's going to be very exciting how record companies embrace it because they're going to have to embrace it at some point. Right now, they're really trying to like get rid of it because it could-- If it gets out of hand, it could lead to a widespread pirating and nobody's ever going to get royalties ever again.

Taylor: That's called a disruptive technology and Professor Clayton Christianson of Harvard, but a bright man anyway, wrote a book on disruptive technology. It was referenced some this morning. It's pieces of technology that will completely change an industry and MP3 is one of them. I highly recommend that book. It's called the Innovators' Dilemma.

Krishnaswami: DSL is digital subscriber line. There's different types of how the speed connections for Internet. There's T1 which is the fastest which most businesses have and it's like $1,000.00 or more a month to have. There's digital subscriber lines which is what you'll find that go through the telephone wires which most people are going to start to get. There's other forms. There's satellite technology, things like that. Most people have a dial-up analog connection. It goes right to the phone lines. It's a very slow speed connection. Broadband just refers to the size of the pipe, so how much data can you put through that pipe and it's really going to be both the speed of the connection and also the compression and other technologies to increase the size of the pipe and that's going to be what's going to be required to really do either higher quality MP3 or what we call mpeg which is motion and video.

Johanna Drucker: Thank you all very much. I'm sorry we don't have time to go on any further and thank you all for your attention.