What we are gonna do is … collaborate. Computer-generated music will, says computer scientist Raymond Kurzweil, “respond to our physical movements or even our emotions, which the computer-based system … could detect from the subtelties of our facial expressions or perhaps even our brain waves.” Interactive literacy works are being created in which “the reader determines the story’s outcome by controlling its branching of events.” Digitized films, writes Richard Lanham in “The Electronic Word,” “can now be released with alternative outtakes, or alternative endings from which each viewer will assemble a private ideal version at home.” Computer programs like AARON will enable the electronic Everyman to produce works of visual art. Coming soon, says Kurzweil, are “artificial people … life-size, three-dimensional images … indistinguishable from real people.” Such spectral citizens might become actors in a computerized drama or musical (“I Got Algorithim”) or act as “teachers, entertainers and companions.”
A utopian euphoria animates the visions of these apostles of electronic culture. Lanham’s book is the most brilliant mapping of the technoverse to yet emerge. But his vision of art is surprisingly narrow, stuck in the groove of “play.” He’s besotted with the computer’s ability to fuse image, word, sound into multimedia. Load a CD-ROM of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and you’ve got “a weapon in your hands after 2,500 years of pompous pedantry aobut the Great Books … Hey, man, how about some music with that stuff? … Add some graphics and graffiti!” Well, why stop there? What about hypertexting Scripture, scrambling Matthew, Mark, Luke and John like four apostolic stooges? You can have fun with Dante, key-stroking characters from the Paradiso into the Inferno and adding a rock score by Nine Inch Nails.
Anything goes, and though the evangels of multimedia see this as liberation from the bonds of burnt-out tradition, it may be artistic entropy, the coming of a new chaos that’s a parody of democracy. There’s no stopping technology; it has an absolute energy, like the speed of light. But the technoverse needs its Homer, its Shakespeare, its Cezanne, to whip all those multimediated pixels into a new synthesis that deserves to be called art.
