The Future of Multimedia Art

In their article, “Personal Dynamic Media,” Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg state that “the interactions of humans with their media have been primarily nonconversational and passive in the sense that marks on paper, paint on walls, even “motion” pictures and television, do not change in response to the viewer’s wishes,” and that “once put down on paper [ideas] remain static and require the reader to expand their possibilities.” However, today media does allow for user interaction. Since this goal of creating an interactive form of media has been achieved, what is next in multimedia?

I would say (or perhaps hope) that it lies in user (or, in the case of art, “viewer”) creation as opposed to interaction. Take the internet for example. There are millions of people who can be classified as internet “users.” However, there are very few that can be classified as “creators.” A creator, in my mind, is someone who takes their corner of the internet (their web page) and creates something new and different by themselves. There is a lot of user interaction these days. Look at Myspace for example. It allows for users to change the way their page looks to reflect their own personal style. However the backbone of the system remains the same. People who edit their Myspace pages are not creating anything, they’re simply interacting with it by changing the way it looks.

The same can be said for multimedia art. Lets take JacksonPollock.org for example. This piece allows users to create “art” similar to that of Jackson Pollock by mimicking his gesture and stroke. The end result is that the user has made their own artistic piece. However, have they truly “created” anything? The way the strokes appear and the colors of the paint are predetermined by the original artist. So the user is not actually “creating” anything. They’re simply interacting with the original artists creation.

I’d say that, at some point in the future, multimedia art will move to a point that will allow the viewer of a piece to truly create their own art with that piece. How will this happen? Honestly, I have no idea. I cannot imagine a computer or a program that will allow a viewer to have complete freedom on what they create without requiring tremendous knowledge of coding, modeling, design, etc. But then again, technology is advancing daily. I remember when I first started playing computer games. Games had two dimensional, 8-bit graphics. Not long after, there was talk of people making truly three-dimensional games. How absurd, I thought. How could a normal person like myself possibly be able to afford a computer that could render such things in real time? But look at games now. Designers are able to create nearly realistic environments and characters. So who is to say that, a few years from now, some sort of technology will be created that will allow for the sort of user interaction I’m talking about?