Euphoria &amp; Dystopia: Money and Law

Sara Diamond

Beginning in 1995, the fledgling Banff Multimedia Institute undertook the challenge of analyzing, influencing, and building the capacities of a creative digital economy that would support creative and experimental production, design-driven new technologies, and the effective translation of research into the commercial sector. The mission was fuelled by genuine curiosity about the dramatic new technologies of the digital age, the unanswered possibilities of monetizing new forms of interactive content, the Silicon Valley gold rush, and the apparent virtualization of the larger economy. It was clear that an ecosystem needed to grow, and that, in its infancy, conscious interventions and clustering would be critical factors.

Published by Banff Centre Press, Riverside Architectural Press Copyright © 2011 Banff Centre Press, Riverside Architectural Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions would be corrected in subsequent editions. Publication Design and Production: Philip Beesley Architect Inc. Art Director: Hayley Isaacs Copy Editor: Claire Crighton eBook Development: WildElement.ca Riverside Architectural Press, www.riversidearchitecturalpress.com Banff Centre Press, www.banffcentre.ca/press Printing and binding by Regal Printing Limited This book is set in Zurich Lt BT and Garamond Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Euphoria & Dystopia : the Banff New Media Institute dialogues / edited by Sarah Cook and Sara Diamond. Accompanied by HorizonZero DVD. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-920159-71-2 ISDN 1-894773-24-1 1. Art and technology. 2. Banff New Media Institute. I. Cook, Sarah, 1974- II. Diamond, Sara, 1954- N72.T4E97 2011 700.1’05 C2011-905947-9 Black CMYK Pantone THE BANFF NEW MEDIA INSTITUTE DIALOGUES EUPHORIA & DYSTOPIA EDITED BY SARAH COOK & SARA DIAMOND Banff Centre Press . Riverside Architectural Press Contents 6 MONEY & LAW SARA DIAMOND 650 Introduction JEFF LEIPER 685 The Frontier in Internet History MICHAEL NASH 698 Beyond Television, 1995 MARK MULLEN 701 Beyond Television, 1995 JOHN LOWRY 706 Beyond Television, 1995 DEWEY REID 711 Marriage or Divorce, 1997 EVAN SOLOMON 713 Marriage or Divorce, 1997 MARTIN KATZ 718 Marriage or Divorce, 1997 JOHN WYVER 720 Marriage or Divorce, 1997 WILLIAM MUTUAL 724 Marriage or Divorce, 1997 ALEEN STEIN 727 Interactive Screen, 1998 PETER WINTONICK 727 Synch or Stream, 1999 ELLIE RUBIN 731 Financing Multimedia Software and Content Projects, 1997 KEITH KOCHO 739 Financing Multimedia Software and Content Projects, 1997 ANDRA SHEFFER 743 Producing New Media, 1999 BRIAN KATZ 746 Producing New Media, 1999 MIKE STUBBS 748 Money and Law, 1998 J.C. HERZ 750 Big Game Hunters, 1998 EMMA WESTECOTT 763 Producing New Media, 1999 DANIEL IRON, PHILIPPA KING & Arts, Entertainment and Variety Programs: 765 BARBARA WILLIS SWEETE The Rhombus Story, 1998 STUART COSGROVE 769 Managing Controversy: The Channel 4 Success Story, 1998 PATRICK CROWE 771 Producing New Media, 1999 DANIEL CANTY 774 Survival, Revival, Reunion, 2005 MARTIN FREETH 784 Producing New Media, 2000 MARK RESCH 786 Interactive Screen, 2003 STEPHEN SELZNICK 788 Producing New Media, 1999 MEREDITH CARTWRIGHT 794 Money and Law, 1998 CLAY SHIRKY 796 Human Generosity Project, 2001 SIMON POPE 814 Bridges II , 2002 6 Money & Law SARA DIAMOND 651 Beginning in 1995, the fledgling Banff Multimedia Institute undertook the chal- lenge of analyzing, influencing, and building the capacities of a creative digital economy that would support creative and experimental production, design-driven new technologies, and the effective translation of research into the commercial sector. The mission was fuelled by genuine curiosity about the dramatic new tech- nologies of the digital age, the unanswered possibilities of monetizing new forms of interactive content, the Silicon Valley gold rush, and the apparent virtualization of the larger economy. It was clear that an ecosystem needed to grow, and that, in its infancy, conscious interventions and clustering would be critical factors. International companies and strategic industries required the innovation that lay on the edge, while small companies needed resources, test beds, and markets. Of particular urgency was the desire to assist creative new media to find financing and audience share; artists often lacked access to the market altogether. Business models were emerging and untested. Innovations such as search capacity, “collective intel- ligence software,” 1 personalization, and other technologies offered emerging “silver bullets” that would eventually allow content to be monetized. This chapter considers definitional questions, such as what each medium can achieve and what its limits are; how to recognize quality products; and how to categorize and analyze emerging mass platforms, such as games. It was equally important to analyze what audiences wanted and how they behaved in the context of machine-mediated experience. The Banff New Media Institute understood that this was an era of convergence—of industries, technologies, and forms of con- tent—an era of constantly changing configurations (hence the change of nomen- clature from the mainstream “multimedia” to the wider term “new media”), and an era in which the dominant industries that entered the game would not necessarily remain in either the same form or retain their original power. The BNMI assisted in the aggregation of resources for the multiplicity of micro-com- panies that made up the digital world; found means to expose artists’ projects to the 1 See Tony Segaran, Programming Collective Intelligence (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2007). TH E UE P HMOAT R IEAR&I A DY L KSNTO OWP IN A :ATSHD E ATA B A N F F N E W M E D I A I N S T I T U T E D I A LO G U ES commercial sector; and undertook intensive matchmaking and networking, creating 652 forums such as Producing New Media: Money and Law and Interactive Screen. The BNMI convened policy and strategic forums such as The Summer Summit at the Summit (1997) and the Human Generosity Project: Tools That Enable Collaboration summit (2001); created competitions and mentorship systems such as CyberPitch; and, eventually, established incubators and accelerators to strengthen its co-production program. The BNMI committed itself to supporting local western Canadian and national digital-media creative and information communication technology (ICT) economies within the context of global industries and markets. At Interactive Screen 19.98,2 international programming featured presentations on co-production by Frank Boyd of ARTEC (UK) and Kieran O’Hea of the European Union, while also fostering international co-production by providing programming and trade missions to MILIA and MIPCOM.3 The BNMI provided sharply focused skills-training workshops in interactive design and emerging technologies and built an enduring collaboration with the Banff Television Festival (Btvf). The BNMI predicted trends. For many years it underscored the importance that user- generated content would have to have substance, form, and monetization. To this point, it made “Power to the People” the theme of the entire 2001 The Banff Centre Presents @ the Banff Television Festival.4 The BNMI also catalogued creative practices, genres, and financing strategies that were emerging in Canada and abroad, and evalu- ated these in good and bad times. In 2001, Producing New Media: Money and Law looked back at the recent “correction” of 2000 and asked international digital-media companies, research analysts, and financial policy analysts whether the industry was 2 The date subtitle began a BNMI convention that expressed the date of each Interactive Screen in a way that suggested a digital time stamp. 3 In 1998, BNMI created a panel at MILIA in Cannes that has entered industry folklore. The panel explored the ways that the body was implicated by new media. An international panel of performance artists (such as Maris Bustamente of Mexico), games designers, and new-media artists (such as Simon Pope) were fed a delicious meal by Emma Westecott, with television cameras documenting every morsel. Each presenter was interviewed by me, or provided a dramatic performance. 4 The Banff Television Festival guide stated, “We will look at how audiences with attitude create situations where the user becomes a collaborator with the artist, designer, and producer. What can we learn from the mass popularity of a service such as Napster? Some would suggest that users want to be veejays and deejays and are not interested in stealing copyright. Teenagers in Finland have re-purposed their cellular phones and created a playful social subculture. Artists are making spaces and contacts for stories and play environments where a new generation of audience becomes participants. This session will explore how audiences have changed, how we can meet their needs, and what new opportunities participatory media has to offer.” Roma Khanna assumed the role of moderator, and Peter Grimsdale (Head, Cross-Platform Development, Channel 4 Television), Zev Shalev (Co-founder/CEO, U8TV. com), and Will Wright (Designer, The Sims and The Sims Online, Maxis) spoke on the panel. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK back on its feet again after the crash. Interactive Screen pulled focus from interactive fic- tion to social media, interactive documentary, and children’s programming. For exam- 653 ple, in 2001, the focus of Interactive Screen was “Interactive and Immersive Fiction,” with a series of panels led by BBC Imagineering’s Cath Le Couteur and Rowena Goldman.5 Interactive Screen (2002) marked the beginning of a recurring interest in children’s interactive media. On the panel “Designing for Young Audiences,” Andrew Cochran of Cochran Communications in Halifax presented Theodore Tugboat and Pit Pony, children’s television series with interactive components.6 The BNMI imported analysis and emerging technologies from the institute’s research-oriented summits to its industry-oriented workshop Money and Law, its development lab Interactive Screen, and The Banff Centre Presents @ the Banff Television Festival. In 2005, its 11th year, the BNMI held an Interactive Screen 0.5 / Money and Law summit subtitled Survival, Revival, Reunion: From Platform Media to Mobility, “celebrating ten years of creativity at high altitude” and gathering together Canadian and international alumni who had attended several events and who had gravitas within the digital-media industries and art worlds. The streams discussed at the event indicate 10 years of BNMI preoccupations. These included: the divergence around convergence; critical new-media IP landmarks; the chang- ing models of companies and monetization strategies; interactive storytelling and narrative; and design. The summit ended with an overview of critical content and technology decisions spanning the dot-com and social-media years, summarized as, “content is king vs. technology is king vs. hybridity is king.” BNMI events became forums for interchanges regarding the role of government and policy directions for the new-media economy. These events were sounding boards for strategies to monetize new media. In its programming strand at the Banff Television Festival, the BNMI partnered with Telefilm Canada to produce a Strategy and Policy Symposium (1998) that explored the “tough issues of regulation, financing, and mass, regional and niche content.” 7 Speakers were asked to consider whether there was a relationship between, “public policy, a healthy marketplace, and research and 5 A second panel on story-games featured British games designer David Furlow of Domestic Funk Products (UK), who spoke of “highly interactive drama.” This was followed by well-known interactive-story writer Matt Costello (Polar Productions, USA) and British Canadian performance- music artist Vanessa Richards (Mannafest, UK). 6 Speakers included Madelon Evers and Daniel Lutz of Human Shareware (Netherlands), an educational consultancy that used software to facilitate learning, as well as Richard Poon of the Northern Alberta Institute of Technologies, who discussed the future of educational technologies. 7 BNMI Program Brochure, Banff New Media Institute (1998). T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA 654 Left Neil Sieling was a faculty member and moderator for Interactive Screen events and a participant in The Banff Super Conductor: Network Collaborations, Convergent Services, ecommerce, Tactical Media, Filling for Fat Pipes (2000) and Human Generosity Project: Tools That Enable Collaboration (2001). Courtesy of the BNMI. Right Executive Director Telefilm Canada Francis Maccerola, Minister of Canadian Heritage Sheila Copps, and BNMI Director and Artistic Director of Media & Visual Arts Sara Diamond announce the Canadian Multimedia Fund at the Banff Television Festival, 1998. Courtesy of The Banff Centre. development.” 8 This direction positioned the BNMI to engage in key policy discus- sions regarding digital media with various federal ministries. In 1998, when Heritage Minister Sheila Copps announced the establishment of a $30 million, five-year Canadian Multimedia Fund to support Canadian content for Internet sites, CD-ROMs, and other multimedia projects created by private companies, she invited me to join her and Telefilm’s Executive Director Francis Maccerola at the podium. Dialogues at the BNMI could also be critical of government policy. Funding agencies such as the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund that resulted from social-benefit programs9 effec- tively subsidized an industry, yet required a broadcast license in order to trigger sup- port for interactive content. This produced a dependency on an often too-conservative broadcasting industry, and may have inhibited exploration of non-broadcast digital content and forms (mobile-, web-, or games-based). All of these initiatives were only fruitful because the BNMI was able to convene the right tables, set them properly, and provide a lavish and delectable feast. Steve 8 Ibid. 9 The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Canada’s regulatory authority, required a percentage of funds be given back to the media community for production and training when mergers or acquisitions occurred or when new licenses were granted. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK Billinger10 described Producing New Media: Money and Law as, “a kind of salon meets research lab environment.” As a sequestered and independent gathering place 655 in the mountainous wilderness, the BNMI played a unique role for industry; it was a place where rules could be laid aside because collective survival at the “frontier” 11 was at stake. The BNMI’s philosophy was to put co-dependent and sometimes opposing parties in the same room; it thus constructed conversations between financial gatekeepers and creative industries. It occasionally played a more disrup- tive card, bringing the tactical-media movement face-to-face with media corpora- tions in its business-oriented forums. For example, at Money and Law (1998), the humorous and technologically sophisticated artists’ collective RTMark presented their commitment to intervening against corporate control of digital media, includ- ing the Internet, the rise of branded content, and gender bias in the video-games industry.12 The event included an appeal for the benefits of financing new-media art by commercial industry, which was provided by Mike Stubbs of Hull Time Based Arts and is excerpted in this chapter. These interventions occurred in an event dedicated to exploring national versus international markets, providing business advice,13 and offering a breadth of fine-tuned legal advice, on such jurisdictional issues as emerging cyber torts. BNMI participants represented an international who’s who of celebrities of the new-media world, individual artists, and exciting dot-com start-up companies. International participants brought an overview of global markets and producing strategies. Peter Girardi of Funny Garbage shared his extensive experience in producing interactive experiences for the World Wide Web and emerging digital-media and branded content and ads for Microsoft, Viacom, Time Warner, and Bloomberg. AudioRom’s CEO, Andre Ktori, brought insights about music technology, DJ culture, and British digital subculture. British small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and online-technology and games designers attended regularly, such as Orlando Mathias of Digit London Ltd. and Anthony Rowe, who founded Squidsoup. Other international participants were Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits of ELAB in Latvia (see http://www.banffcentre.ca/wpg/exhibitions/2002/ refleksija/essays_mt.html for an excellent overview of the high level of new-media 10 Former Vice-President, Strategic Relations, Urbanalien 11 See Jeff Leiper’s essay on page 685. 12 They gave a spirited presentation on their funding model, in which they stated: “RTMark’s approach to fundraising mirrors the corporate system of which RTMark is an integral if unwelcome part. Contributors to RTMark may allocate their funds to specific projects such as Stocks or to those groups of projects (Fund Families) managed by RTMark or its celebrities.” See also http:// affinityproject.org/groups/rtmark.html for details of RTMark approach see http://www.rtmark. com/history.html. 13 The opening panel was entitled “Can’t They See My Genius?” and focused on building a coherent and well-structured business case. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA 656 Left Evan Solomon speaks during CyberCafe evening. Surf ’s Up! The Deep Web Workshop, 1996. Courtesy of The Banff Centre. Right Douglas Rushkoff gives a keynote address. Surf ’s Up! The Deep Web Workshop, 1996. Courtesy of The Banff Centre. art in Latvia in the ’90s and early 21st century) and Femke Wolting, who produced the Exploding Cinema festival and related think thanks and exhibitions in the Netherlands. There were also artists, producers, and theorists from the emerging world, such as Artur Matuck of the Universidade de São Paulo. Broadcasters, ISPs, lawyers, private and public funds, and Canadian and interna- tional governments came to the BNMI events to rub shoulders with the digirati.14 For example, the 1995 Interactive Screen Workshop: Beyond Television acted as a bookend event for the Banff Television Festival. Speakers included digital luminaries of the era, such as Michael Nash15 and keynote speaker Carol Peters,16 a remarkable woman who had jumped from her role as Silicon Graphics Inc.’s chief technology officer to develop interactive television content.17 In 1996, the Surf ’s Up! workshop included popular futurist Douglas Rushkoff,18 Alliance’s Steven DeNure (a passionate sup- porter of interactive media),19 and Evan Solomon, then editor-in-chief of Shift 14 This term infers the elite of the digital-media and computer industries. 15 CEO and Founding President of Inscape, former Director of the Criterion Collection (one of the first interactive film collections) 16 Chairperson/CEO, daVinci Time & Space 17 Peters produced for Time Warner, Viacom, US West, the Disney Channel, Discovery, and the Cartoon Network. These speakers were joined by Ted East (Vice-President, Alliance Classics and Alliance Communications). 18 See http://www.rushkoff.com/ for Rushkoff’s publications and blogs. 19 President, Alliance Productions and Alliance Multimedia, Alliance Communications Corp. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK magazine, who gave a keynote address (excerpted on page 713). The BNMI presented early social-media inventor and author Harold Rheingold, co-creator of The WELL.20 657 Musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson provided keynotes embedded with her iconoclastic wisdom at both the 1996 and 1997 Interactive Screens (excerpted on page 340). Online novelist Douglas Cooper kicked off discussions about interac- tive writing and the web. Eugene Evans, a games developer with Mindscape Inc. whose varied credits include Zone Raiders, Zoop (Viacom), and ShadowGate brought his knowledge of the emerging gaming industry and games development. Janet H. Murray, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher and celebrated writer of Hamlet on the Holodeck 21 attended, and gave both a seminar on narrative and interactivity and a public lecture. Razorfish, one of the most dynamic content creation/advertising companies of the time (now owned by Microsoft), regularly sent participants and recruited from Interactive Screen. The Summer Summit at the Summit (1997) was an Industry Canada–funded think tank that was particularly notable, as it attracted the creative leadership of interactive media—whether games, publish- ing, technology, or research.22 Banff hosted actress/producer Geena Davis, games designers Durrell Bishop, David Braben, Terry Braun, Eugene P. Jarvis, and Greg Roach, and tech wizards Michael Coyote, Ralph Derrickson, Bill Buxton, and Drew Takahashi.23 Interactive Screen (2002) had a typically international base, hosting 60 participants from Australia, the UK, the US, and Canada.24 Play was important, and was threaded throughout. Programs were riddled with language games, physical and verbal ice-breakers, teasers, design challenges, and game-play meant to solve problems through participatory design. An Interactive Screen standard, “The Blindfold Test,” encouraged groups of three to explore a woody glen at The Banff Centre. A group member was blindfolded, another led the blindfolded individual through a brief outdoor experience, and a third observed and documented them. Participants then switched places. During 20 The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) (http://www.well.com/) was an early Internet conferencing system that began in 1985 and was the Whole Earth electronic link. Rheingold wrote Tools for Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984) proposing that computers were “mind amplifiers,” and The Virtual Community (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). He also helped to create HotWired in 1994. His Smart Mobs (New York: Perseus Books, 2002) heralded the era of mobile social relationships. 21 Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 22 I created The Summer Summit at the Summit with Joshua Portway of Real World, with significant participation from Interval Research, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s private applied research centre in Palo Alto, CA. Allen also collaborated with Banff during the Art and Virtual Environments Project. 23 The list of other notable participants can be found in the back of the book. 24 A longer version of this introduction will be made available online, and will provide a thorough overview of where participants hailed from. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA 658 Left William (Wm) Leler gives his famous shoulder rub to Sara Diamond, seated next to Bill Buxton at a Lake Louise dinner. Telus Presents: Out of the Box: The Future of Interface, 1997. Courtesy of the BNMI. Right Sara Diamond and Jackie Lawrence (Channel 4) celebrate at Lake Louise. Banff Television Festival, 1998. Courtesy of the BNMI. the activity, participants paid attention to all their senses, including hearing, smell, and touch. Guides and observers remarked on the interface that they and the blindfolded member constructed. All team members later drew a map of their experiences; an overlay of the maps was created, providing a rich media- navigation strategy for the glen. The group discussed the experience and what it might promise for interactive design.25 Immersion in the mountain environment was inextricably linked to the success of these events, as were intensive social networking and play.26 The environment may have first seemed intimidating—with its focus on verbal acu- men and creative expression—but it was equally intimate, a condition that 25 This Interactive Screen (2001) also included “Games for the Duration,” which featured “First Person,” wherein individuals established goals of behaviour that they wished to elicit from another and carefully documented all of their activities to successfully or unsuccessfully elicit that behaviour. A second game, “The Art of Gossip,” used concepts from reality television and extended-reality gaming. The exercise required participants to create credible, context-appropriate stories, “perhaps about people, perhaps about Banff,” find means to communicate these stories (such as the use of embedded clues), and hold to these stories until the end, when they would be analyzed for interactive effect. Designers could use “Topological Mappings,” which required participants to find and map actual objects and build interactive maps with embedded clues. Another game was entitled “Engineering”; in it, “people in the group suggest a problem that they want solved and others design a tool or product to solve this.” 26 Each night featured Banff Centre events or a social event, and events culminated in an evening at my home that included dancing, a long walk around Canmore, seasonal badminton on the lawn, dips in the hot tub, and pleasant chatter in the front-yard gazebo. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK elicited honesty and trust. For example, Keith Kocho of Digital Renaissance turned to the assembled group at 1998’s Money and Law: An Up-To-The Minute Seminar 659 on Financing Digital Media Content and Software and asked them which of two investors he should accept, informing the group that he would follow their advice. In 2003, budding entrepreneurs Roma and Raja Khanna detailed the dynamic growth of Snap Media, their successful company, and discussed the pressures they were under to change its highly creative internal culture, appealing to others for advice. A core element of the events’ success was the reliance on case studies such as these. For example, the millennial year of Y2K—2000—was a significant Interactive Screen, occurring at a juncture that had predicted the crash of all computer systems. Instead, the new-media industry was crashing. Presenters’ case studies included networked new media, authoring tools, games, artwork, convergence media, and digital archives and databases.27 The BNMI was committed to equity and gathered data to measure four elements of its participant base: gender, region, visible minority status, and Aboriginality. The BNMI ensured that there was equitable representation of women at all of its events, from its research summits to its economically focused events.28 The emerging new- media industries included significant women leaders, some who were at the head of technology companies—for example, Bulldog’s Ellie Rubin—and others who led in content creation, such as Brenda Laurel.29 Even in fields that were male- dominated—like games design—there were women designers and company owners as well as scholars, such as J.C. Herz. The BNMI ensured that there was strong rep- resentation of visible-minority participants, whether engineers, artists, or entrepre- neurs. Although the BNMI collaborated with Aboriginal Arts to produce a specific stream of Aboriginal new-media training and economic-development events, there was nonetheless a consistent Aboriginal presence at Interactive Screen. Artist/inven- tor/software designer and leader of Cyber PowWow Skawennati Tricia Fragnito was a regular contributor, as was Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew (the Cree/French Canadian web director of the Aboriginal People’s Television Network and winner of the pres- tigious CanWest Global Award),30 Jason Lewis of Interval Research, and artists such 27 There was a formal partnership with ARTEC (UK). As well as exploring survival strategies for industry, the organizers looked to “old media,” asking what could be learned, with answers from Futurescape co-founder Ozlem Tuncil; Suzanne Chapman; XPT creative director Rob Bevan; XPT managing director Tom Harvey; and Telefilm Canada senior multimedia investment analyst Keith Clarkson. 28 The participant list at the back of the book bears testimony to this. 29 There were many female new-media artists, theorists, and curators. 30 Other Aboriginal attendees included artist Sheryl Kootenayhoo, writer/producer Jennifer Wemigwans, Hopi director Victor Masayesva, and Cree songwriter, performer, and interactive artist Buffy Saint-Marie. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA as Hopi director Victor Masayesva of IS Productions. Canadian participants came 660 to Interactive Screen from across the country.31 The BNMI’s sponsorship and participant list reads as a history of telecommunica- tions and broadcasting mergers and acquisitions, and shows how major American entities such as Microsoft and Viacom moved into interactive content and then out again. There was a significant support base of Canadian and international media companies, technology companies, ISPs, broadcasters, banks, and law firms. Alliance Communications was the initial commercial sponsor, and was joined by VIACOM, TD Bank,32 Acumen Capital, ACTC Technologies, Telus, the CFCN Production Fund, CanWest Global, Microsoft Network and Research,33 Bell/ MediaLinx, ALIVE TV, Rogers Telefund, Apple Canada, Silicon Graphics Inc., Real Networks, Real World, Blaney McMurty LLP, Montage, Collidescope, XPT City TV, CHUM Television, Stentor, AMPDC, the Edmonton New Media Initiative, and CITI.34 Bell Globemedia, CanWest Global, and Corus Entertainment were signifi- cant 21st century sponsors.35 Silicon Valley North was the official media sponsor through many of the years of the BNMI. Government-agency funding included Telefilm Canada, Industry Canada, IRAP/NRC, Western Economic Diversification, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Alberta Science and Research Authority, and Alberta Foundation for the Arts. 31 The listings under Interactive Screen at the back of the book indicate national involvement. The BNMI strove for strong Quebec representation. Mouna Andraos and Fady Atallah (Co-Founders, Blue Sponge, Montreal) provided case studies of their company’s strategy of balancing service work with the generation of proprietary IP. Peter Wintonick (Producer and Director, Necessary Illusions Productions, Montreal) often shared his observations on the growth and potential of interactive documentary, as did Neil Smolar (CEO and President, NDi Media, Outremont). Paul Ortchanian (Art Director and Web Designer, reflektions.com, Montreal) and new-media producer Benoit Beaudoin (Groupe ECP) provided case studies, and Beaudoin shared in the mentorship programs. 32 TD Bank was a major supporter of both Money and Law and Interactive Screen, but moved away from the tech and digital content sector several years after the crash of 2000. 33 Microsoft Network Canada was committed to content development, and hired former film and television producers. It then reverted to being a technology and research company but retained connections to the BNMI through Microsoft Research 34 Various scholarship mechanisms existed for Interactive Screen and other programs. Beginning in 1998, MSN provided support for scholarship and awards for winning projects. Projects that won their pitch at Interactive Screen in 2000 and 2001 were awarded a co-production opportunity at The Banff Centre and possible development money. The Telefilm Mentorship program began in 2001. Later on, CyberPitch at the Banff Television Festival and other Canadian festivals provided opportunities for winners and runners-up to attend at Interactive Screen for project development. 35 Other supporters included the Banff Television Festival, AMPIA, ASERC, AXIA netmedia, BC Institute of Film Professionals, Canadian Film Centre, IMAT, Institut national de l’image et du son, NAIT, Performing Arts Labs, and SMART Lab. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK D E B AT I N G T H E B I G Q U EST I O N S 661 The period covered in this chapter was one in which we intensively tested what makes a specific medium good for certain experiences and not for others. New media were emerging, and many early products failed to win users or audiences, or were failed by technology. Hence discussions throughout the history of the BNMI centred on understanding and describing the qualities of new media, and the rela- tionship of emerging media to mature ones. Through the years of the BNMI—and despite the growth of interactive components with the ability to broadcast delivery and convergent multi-platform fare—there was a fundamental tension between television and interactive media, both as industry structures and as forms. The metaphors that the BNMI used captured this tension, such as “Marriage or Divorce?” and “Lean Forward or Lean Back?” The death of television was provocatively proclaimed several times at BNMI events, most famously by Mark Pesce at Surf ’s Up! The Deep Web Workshop (1996) and again at Marriage or Divorce? Television and the Web (1997). Television was threatened not only by interactivity, but also by digital technologies and new forms of distribu- tion. Technologies allowed television viewers to remove or ignore ads. Traditional media perceived digital expressions as cannibalizing analogue content. The forces of change—driven by generational taste—the relentless assault on distributors, personalization technology such as the personal video recorder (PVR), the flight of audiences, and the growing capacity to flow content across platforms prefigured the re-emergence of convergence at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Attitudes toward BNMI programming at the Banff Television Festival oscillated between curiosity, anxiety, and arrogant relief after the crash of 2000, with interest rekindling in 2003 as the disruptive forces of Napster and user-generated content began to affect mainstream media. At the same time, new-media producers asked “what do audiences want?” Forums such as Beyond Television, Marriage or Divorce?, and Interactive Screen (2005) lamented the gap between what audiences said they were interested in—interac- tive media—and what they did; viewers opted for passive media (albeit over digital platforms) and sought relatively limited interaction, except in gaming. In 2003, Interactive Screen gathered Canadian micro-companies and small and medium enter- prises that were creating digital media content, as well as participants from Australia, the UK, and the USA, to seek solutions to the post-2000 malaise in the technology and digital-media industries and to better understand audience demand and moneti- zation strategies. This focus attracted government leaders, such as Ted Bairstow, T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA the director general of Canadian Culture Online of the Department of Canadian 662 Heritage. The summit analyzed progress with convergence in a hard-hitting panel entitled “From Convergence to New Media: To TV and Back,” which charted the rise and fall of international media corporations’ relationship to convergence. It predicted that there would be future plays as technology and consumer demand rolled forward for converged platforms and content. Interactive Screen regularly addressed computer games as an industry and creative practice, and a specific summit—Bell Canada and MediaLinx Present Big Game Hunters (1998)—dove deeply into the gaming industry.36 This event picked up one of the threads from The Summer Summit at the Summit and brought together American, British, French, and Canadian thinkers interested in analyzing video games, well before games studies emerged as a field. Big Game Hunters included many of the participants from The Summer Summit, as well as critic J.C. Herz, art- ist Natalie Bookchin, author Terry Borst, theorist Susan Bennett, David Chatto,37 curator Carl Goodman,38 futurist Jan Hauser,39 Softimage developers Maggie Kathwaroon and Gareth Morgan, Stewart Kosoy,40 Semiotext(e) editor Sylvère Lotringer, theorist and artist Lev Manovich,41 games analyst Katie Salen, AI designer Bruce Wilcox, author and journalist Sue Wilcox, Computer Gaming World Magazine editor Johnny L. Wilson, developers Ian Verchere,42 Greg Zeschuk, Kian Wilcox, Eric Zimmerman, and some 15 additional participants. Despite its strong new-media base, the BNMI acted as a proponent for creative television. Its predecessor program (Television and Video, 1992–94) had worked closely with public broadcasters to promote arts television in the early ’90s, and the BNMI continued strong relationships with the BBC and Channel 4 in the UK, the CBC in Canada, Bravo!, and eventually other broadcasters—in particular, in relation to convergent content. The BNMI showcased creative individuals and companies, such as John Wyver (excerpted in this chapter), who created The Mirror, an experimental foray into chat rooms that was tested with mass audi- ences through the BBC and Channel 4. Arts, Entertainment and Variety Programs: The Rhombus Story (1998) provided a behind-the-scenes look at Rhombus, one 36 The summit was co-created by Joshua Portway and me. 37 Director, Electra Media 38 Digital Media, American Museum of the Moving Image 39 Vice-President, Sun Microsystems 40 Vice-President, MGM Interactive 41 Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego 42 Creative Director, Radical Entertainment SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK of Canada’s most award-winning companies. In 1998, Stuart Cosgrove presented Managing Controversy: The Channel 4 Success Story (excerpted on page 769), 663 which excavated what could be done with an independent channel that was always anticipating trends but had enough viewership to sustain creative pro- duction. Meet the Brits, a 1995 bookend event that followed the Banff Television Festival, celebrated the creative and critical approach of British television and its ability to work with independent producers, in the hopes to provoke a wider range of programming in North America. The BNMI expressed its interest in documentary not only in relation to the impact of digital technology on factual television and the potential of interactive documentary, but in the larger field. The Documentary Deluge: What’s Fuelling the Documentary Revival? (1996)—which took place before the Television Festival—was prompted by the renewed interest in documentary. It provided case studies of auteur documen- tary as well as populist television fare, and considered audience and financing. The BNMI also promoted emerging forms of online comedy. Events such as Producing New Media: Money and Law, Interactive Screen, and Banff’s programming at the Television Festival consistently presented emerging digital services and cutting-edge attempts at new distribution forms, such as the Virtual Film Festival, discussed in this chapter by Peter Wintonick. As new media emerged as a force, the BNMI prompted a series of discussions on user experience. The commercial-media world was interested in measuring how many eyeballs it attracted, where and on what medium these were focused, and the number, duration, and concentration level of clicks and impressions. In the social- media world, hearts and minds would become more important than eyeballs and ears. Studied or not, users/participants exerted their control, generating content and forever changing the character of the Internet. As Meredith Cartwright proposes in this chapter, early personalization technologies showed tremendous potential for directing content toward users and generating advertising dollars; e-commerce also proved a consistent topic of discussion at the BNMI. A number of presentations (excerpted in this chapter) at Big Game Hunters suggested the value of conducting analysis from perspective of user experience, examining “entrainment”—that is, the patterns of response and counter-response that go on between the human and the computer. This notion bears relevance to Daniel Canty’s discussion of the differ- ences between new media and old—the machine is the third party that mediates between author and audience. User-experience design drew on participatory design methods that bring users into the design phase in emerging technologies and even T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA creative content. Content companies were not versed in user-experience design or 664 analysis, although some—such as ExtendMedia—brought this knowledge in from software development; Patrick Crowe, discussing Drop the Beat at Interactive Screen (2000), explains this phenomenon in his excerpt in this chapter.43 Nevertheless, attention to audience members, their experience, and the usability of the artwork were an anathema to the new-media art world, with a few exceptions.44 Considerations of design from many perspectives—as a skill set that required training, as a strategy, as an emerging language45—formed a critical component of BNMI offerings. The BNMI provided workshops such as Visual Design for Interactive Media (1997 and 1998), Advanced Design for Multi Media (1999), and Interactive Media Design (2000). User-experience design became a concern within Interactive Screen, with specific workshops and discussions centred on design, in part driven by participants such as American industrial designer Andy Diaz Hope and long-term faculty member Martha Ladly. For example, the year 2001 included an intensive seminar with Marina Zurkow on the principles of interactive design.46 Sponsor CanWest Global provided a presentation from Thea Partridge,47 a new- media design expert and a faculty lead for Interactive Screen. Design exercises and presentations led by Rob Bevan, Jan-Christoph Zoels,48 Martha Ladly, and me pro- vided design exercises as an experiential component of Interactive Screen. Inclusive design awareness became a theme that repeated in years to come and is discussed in Chapter 5 (“Social & Individual Identity in New Media”).49 Discussion centred on the role of narrative in interactive experience, as speakers asked the question: “Is narrative necessary for commercially successful interaction?” Some of the most exhilarating sessions were case studies, because Interactive Screen 43 His presentation was preceded by television producer Suzanne Chapman, who provided her perspectives on this project. 44 Future Physical in the UK undertook user-experience studies as did Sponge, CodeZebra, and the Mobile Digital Commons Network. 45 These are interaction design, experience design, participatory design, and navigation design. 46 Zurkow returned to the BNMI regularly to share her projects and provide instruction and mentorship in interaction design. 47 Thea Partridge was creative director of CanWest Global and is now deceased. 48 At Interactive Screen (2004), the kick-off keynote by Jan-Christoph Zoels, the senior associate professor of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (Italy), began the design stream for the event, which was entitled “Participant-Driven Design, Participant-Driven New Media—Modelling the Future.” 49 In 2003, Interactive Screen provided a unique opportunity for Vera Roberts and her colleagues from the Adaptive Technology Research Centre at the University of Toronto to lead awareness-training sessions for producers about inclusive-design thinking and strategies and the translation of works into usable formats for the disabled. These sessions were eye-opening for their participants. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK participants were absorbed in the creation of new forms of storytelling, such as stranded narratives. They debated whether audiences would enjoy multiple endings, 665 or whether narratives needed to drive toward the same ending through different means. There were experiments in character-driven multimedia, in which a player could choose to play from a specific perspective. There were associative experiences that used search metaphors and choreography rather than story. As games moved to centre stage, Interactive Screen and forums such as Big Game Hunters pulled apart the ways in which games worked, offering them as an alternative to television or as a new way to engage with plot and character. The BNMI supported the growth of many aspects of the content industries. Educational New Media: A Strategy Session (1999) featured leading education theorists, content producers, and politicians. The summit examined the changing philosophy of learning, looking at case studies and implementation processes for distributed education and the design of networked environments. It considered when technology enhances learning and when it fails. The session occurred at a time when Alberta was bringing networked capacity throughout its K–12 learning environment, and allowed the BNMI to add value to that process as well as to sup- port the educational multimedia industry. When the BNMI began, tools were inaccessible, difficult to use, and unable to sup- port content. There was tremendous frustration at the gap between aspirations and the ability of the technology to deliver. Broadband was an experimental mode, and streaming video was inefficient and expensive. At the Interactive Screen workshop Beyond Television, speakers such as Rocket Science games producer Mark Mullen described the revolution that HTML represented as an example of an entirely new opportunity for creative practice. The chapter has a number of predictions of tech- nological change, as well as pronunciations about the speed of change and adop- tion. At Marriage or Divorce?, Microsoft’s Dewey Reid proposed the “destination PC: half-TV, half-computer” that he believed would shortly disrupt the traditional ergonomics of the living room. At the same event, convergent media guru John Wyver invented the concept of “broad catching,” an early notion of contributory social media. By 2005, the transition to functional and reliable systems—as well as forms that non-experts could use, such as blogging and file-sharing—was underway, fundamentally disrupting media culture. Producing New Media: Money and Law and Interactive Screen provided concrete financing strategies. This might mean importing the film and television model of gap T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA financing, or relying on advertising, brand sponsorship, and subscription. Ways of 666 measuring “eyeballs,” “hits” and returns, and means to attract more viewers to interac- tive products were constants threads of conversation. This was a period in which few pay-per-view models worked, nor were advertising dollars yet moving toward the Internet. E-commerce was seen as a core strategy, but the technology was not yet sta- ble. Events struggled with the potential of niche versus mass content—and the hopes that the Internet would allow the emergence of the long tail and niche markets. This was particularly poignant after the decline of the CD-ROM market. There were consistent discussions regarding global markets and how these differed from or resembled Canadian markets—when it was wise for producers or compa- nies to pursue international markets—and the impacts of funding structures and Canadian content regulations on this capacity. Canada was a small market, con- strained by regulation while supported by it. Participants also considered the ways in which investment structures can shape an industry. This played out in require- ments or lack of requirements for convergent licensing arrangements for digital content as defined by Telefilm and the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund. The lack of angel funding and venture capital after 2000 and the rigidity of many of the banks were challenges for companies in the technology sector. Difficulty in monetizing content could create risk aversion. In imagining the pos- sibility of independent computer games with flexible genres that would appeal to adults, Digital Village new-media producer and games theorist Emma Westecott (excerpted on page 763) suggested that the games industry was “too new to be as conservative as it is.” 50 She suggested that games developers needed investment mod- els—like those of the independent-film industry—that would allow for new forms of expression. The eruption of frustrations at Big Game Hunters between developers, marketers, and publishers (excerpted in this chapter) captured these tensions. In understanding the requirements of building a successful digital-media company, the BNMI tracked successes and failures and shared these. Entrepreneurs like Bulldog founder Ellie Rubin (excerpted on page 731) shared key lessons from their successes. Rubin reinforced the notion that there are “no rules” in the new-media industry, as Jeff Leiper suggested, yet successfully extracted and shared patterns from her com- pany’s success. Some BNMI companies scored direct hits. William (Wm) Leler 50 Westecott spoke at Money and Law (1999), providing a case study of the “Digital Village” for the panel “Distribution and Marketing Issues in New Media, Niche Product Here and Abroad, Cultural Content Roundtable.” SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK established Zat Inc. in August 1996 as a Java-based technology partner to Dysmedia, an online game company.51 Leler built Jack and sold his company in March 2001 667 for about $50 million. The chapter includes the success stories of creative content producers such as Marble Media, who developed products for hearing impaired audiences, children’s television, and new-media content, and some of Canada’s first interactive billboards—aptly mixing an experimental research-based capacity with product appropriate to contemporary audiences and technologies. There were failures. The most consistent were in the broad field of niche creative new media, which, as Daniel Canty points out in this chapter, is still struggling to find its market. The heartbreaking story of the Voyager Company (led by Aleen and Bob Stein) was one of these, where, despite the draw of their powerful CD-ROM production and Criterion film collection, a successful distribution model did not emerge. There was not yet the high-speed Internet or tablet computing technolo- gies necessary to accommodate their content. Equally striking was the inability of Real World Multimedia products to find a North American market. This chapter holds stories of good ideas with premature business models; technologies (such as VRML) that were unable to sustain a market for the creative content made for them by talented producers such as Andy Best and Merja Puustinen; and products made for platforms that became obsolete. The period covered in this book is one in which technology innovation was more often rewarded than content innovation. T H E E M E R G I N G WO R L D O F D I G I TA L I P A N D D I G I TA L R I G H T S The complex world of digital rights evolved with each year of Producing New Media: Money and Law and Interactive Screen. The BNMI attracted a cohort of lawyers who specialized in new-media intellectual-property issues, led by Stephen Selznick, who eventually took over the role of chairing the expanded legal sessions.52 51 Dysmedia was an online game company that was created by Douglas Cooper with the help of The Banff Centre and a number of other Banff New Media Institute participants: Joshua Portway, Charles Buchanen, and me. Dysmedia’s goals were to prototype and commercialize The Secret, an early online game that emerged from the 1996 Interactive Screen workshop. The Secret almost achieved financing through various BNMI supporters but was ultimately too early for the supporting Internet technologies of the time. The game Majestic, described in Chapter Five (“Social & Individual Identity in New Media”) is closest in concept. 52 The legal team was Ravi Shukla (Technology Counsel, Long Michener Barristers and Solicitors), Mary Barroll (Director of Business and Legal Affairs, Alliance Atlantis Communications), Sonja Gundersen (Vice-President of Law and Corporate Development, Apple Canada Inc.), and Meredith Cartwright (Donahue & Partners). James Talbott of Talbott and Talbott, a precedent- setting American lawyer was a regular contributor, provided the American perspective. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA There were intensive workshops on copyright and IP protection that compared 668 software and content IP as well as design patents and trademarks. Banff became an annual forum for reporting on the emergence of cyber law and cyber torts in Canada and abroad, and for lawyers to exchange opinions among themselves as well as with their client base.53 A group of legal experts in open source joined the team attending annually to involve themselves in dialogues about digital rights, open source, and open innovation and to hone their arguments against IP experts.54 For example, at Producing New Media: Money and Law (2002), Ted Byfield (Parsons School of Design), Alan Toner, Jamie King, and James Love55 presented “Copyleft Rights Commons, Peer-to-Peer and Open Source: Alternate Approaches to Rights and Artists’ Payment.” Rather than take one position, the BNMI provided support for a dialogue about open- source versus patents and copyright, at times seeking middle ground or at least case- by-case specificity. The BNMI provided an environment in which to consider strategies on how to support artists within the aggressive and game-changing environment of file-sharing, P2P networks, and open content. While file-sharing mostly absorbed popular culture, its potential to expand to niche content was a threat to marginal art- ists. The Human Generosity Project summit sought a charge-back solution to pay artists within a peer-to-peer economy. Money and Law, Interactive Screen, and events created for the Banff Television Festival also approached file-sharing through the lens of creative content by featuring remix culture and debating the aesthetics of originality. The Human Generosity Project summit provided an in-depth opportunity to focus on the potential and challenges of the open-source economy.56 It was utopian in its 53 In its overall program, the BNMI considered cyber law in relation to other kinds of laws—for example, genetic sequencing (at the event Growing Things: The Culture of Nano Tech, Bio Tech and Eco Tech Meat Art, 2000) and “pharma.” 54 These included Alan Toner (Fellow, Information Law Institute, New York University) and James Love (Director, Consumer Project on Technology), the renowned lawyer who fought to allow generic drugs into HIV-plagued territories. The Creative Commons sent Neeru Paharia, its assistant director. Jamie King of Mute magazine was a regular contributor, and provided an open-source perspective. 55 Love is US co-chair of the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue Working Group on Intellectual Property, founder and chairman of Essential Inventions, chairman of the Union for the Public Domain, chairman of the Civil Society Coalition, and a member of the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) working groups on Intellectual Property and Research and Development, the Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property, and the Initiative for Policy Dialogue Task Force on Intellectual Property. 56 The event was wide-reaching in its constituency. It included artists and toolmakers who concentrated on collaborative tools, as well as artists’ collectives—such as the international Hot Wired Live Art (Hwla)—who were in residence at the BNMI. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK flavour, suggesting the possibility of new forms of social economy.57 It followed on the heels of Unforgiving Memory (2001), a dystopian summit that considered the 669 loss of non-digital cultural memory on one hand, and the tendency toward the per- petual archiving of the digital on the other. The Human Generosity Project summit began with an overview of the emerging configuration of software and related net- work design that enabled collaborative creativity, work, and exchanges—both pro- prietary and open-source.58 This is discussed in depth in Chapter 7 (“Production & Distribution in Models of Collaborative Practice”). Collaborative software systems might enable open-source management, and networks such as ENCART or Netera were imagined as facilitating purposeful project development and production.59 P2P client networking had emerged as one of the most engaging and potentially radical forms of computer practice. P2P used a relatively light programmatic infra- structure that acted as a tool for accessing and sorting large amounts of data on the database, and then distributing that data to other users on the network. The Human Generosity Project summit took notions of open-source beyond software and asked: “Where does the peer-to-peer model work for users as well as makers? What are commercialization and rights strategies for creative collaborations?” The emergence of open-source was not seen as an isolated moment; rather, it was seen as extending debates about public space, rights, and freedom of expression that rose up in the ’20s, ’60s, and ’70s. The summit was meant to consider the possibility of an alterna- tive economy, one that did not suggest toppling the capitalist economy but, rather, running in a parallel reconfiguration. Clay Shirky provided a keynote and panel discussion (excerpted on page 796) outlining the fundamentals of open-source and giving an in-depth analysis of P2P. Shirky laid out both the utopian and dystopian aspects of open-source and file- sharing. The characterization and debate about open-source dialogue continued 57 It was planned that the Human Generosity Project summit would incorporate several key ideas that came forward from Unforgiving Memory. These included the consideration of collective memory as applicable to various levels of technology (the database, library, archive, written and spoken language); analysis of the ways in which libraries and archives construct meaning around particular objects, memories, and ideas; the obsession in contemporary culture with archiving and storing as much as possible through the process of digitization; the change in authenticity from the physical object to the intention of the maker; and, finally, the push and pull between free and regulated economies of data transfer and exchange. 58 Collaborative software for performance, music creation, long-distance media production, learning, and design were being made available by artists, researchers, organizations, and commercial companies in Europe and North America. 59 Technological expertise abounded at the summit in the form of computer scientists from the university and industry sectors. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA through other summits at the BNMI. At Bridges 11: A Conference about Cross- 670 Disciplinary Research and Collaboration (2002), Simon Pope challenged the heroic mythologies that circulated around the open-source model, bringing it into question; this talk is excerpted in the chapter as well. As noted in Shirky’s speech, issues of net neutrality emerged as points of debate. Early broadcast online environments defied the Internet’s maxims: content has the right to flow freely and users have the right to move seamlessly amongst sites. Instead, walled gardens attempted to restrict viewers to the offerings of a media entity. Proponents of net neutrality were opposed to this view, and argued that consumers should have access to any content, any time from their Internet service providers. These debates also played out at the BNMI. In addition, Interactive Screen served as a forum to argue for the value of public spaces for digital media content and creativity. I N T E R ACT I V E S C R E E N, P R O D U C I N G N E W M E D I A : M O N E Y A N D L AW, T H E S U M M E R S U M M I T AT T H E S U M M I T Over its 10 years, Interactive Screen first sought to bring together traditional narrative talent with the interactive-media industry, then addressed the international creative new-media community,60 and later focused primarily on independent creative digital artists from Canada and abroad. The events joined representatives from Canadian banks, technology companies, law firms, funding entities, and a sampling of Canadian commercial companies.61 While focused on Canadian market conditions, there was a strong interna- tional presence. The stated goal was “to stimulate the creation of emotionally powerful, creatively inspired, and economically viable interactive media devel- opment in Canada and abroad.” 62 Producing New Media: Money and Law began as an independent forum to gather the software and content companies 60 Justine and Jim Bizzochi, Neil Sieling, Esther Robinson, William (Wm) Leler, John Sanborn (La Fong), and several Real World Studios participants provided continuity. 61 Steven Comeau (President, Collideascope) was a regular attendee. There was a group associated with ExtendMedia: Keith Kocho (CEO, Digital Renaissance and ExtendMedia Inc), Michel Blondeau (CEO/ Artist, ecentricarts Inc.), and Patrick Crowe, whose first presentations were as senior producer of ExtendMedia Inc. and later as co-CEO of Xenophile Media. Nathan Gunn (President, Bitcasters Inc.) regularly attended. Other regular participants included Roma Khanna (who began as executive vice- president, Marketing and Strategic Development, Snap Media, and then came back in 2004 as vice- president, Interactive, CHUM Television) and Martin Katz. Katz first presented at the BNMI from the film and television industry perspective as executive producer of Atlantis Films and then moved to take on the lead role at Microsoft Canada; he continued his dialogues about emerging new media from that vantage. 62 See the Banff New Media Institute program brochure. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK together with legal and financing entities.63 It merged with Interactive Screen, with the format settling into a three-day symposium followed by the 671 Interactive Screen seven-day project-development laboratory. These shifts were determined by apparent needs in the creative new-media industries, as well as sources of funding. Broadcasters were well-represented at these events, by Rogers Communications,64 CanWest Global, Bell GlobeMedia, the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, City TV,65 CHUM,66 and Bravo.67 Internet service providers such as Telus, Bell/ MediaLinx,68 and Stentor69 also brought their views. Microsoft Network Canada and Microsoft Network International70 were both there. The financial industries consistently partook in Producing New Media: Money and Law. By 2003, when Money and Law was fully integrated into Interactive Screen, the banks became less interested, as their investment in ICT softened after the crash—although they did continue to supply gap financing for the media industries. TD Bank funded Money and Law for many years and Gord Syme (Manager, Technology Banking) helped to structure and lead the event.71 Andra Sheffer,72 Paul Hoffert,73 and Charles Zamaria74 of Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund were regularly in attendance. Telefilm was both a funder and a regular contributor.75 Other 63 Technology companies were present at Producing New Media: Money and Law, including Multimedia Solutions Inc., Digital Frontiers, Woodward & Co., CDIS, Caught in the Web Inc., MultiActive Technologies, and Vicom Multimedia—the latter was also a sponsor. 64 Ruth d’Souza of MSN Canada, Rogers Pay Per View, and GM TeleWorld Communications 65 Josh Raphaelson, General Manager, City Interactive 66 Richard Kanee 67 Judy Gladstone, Executive Director, Bravo! FACT 68 Eva Innes, Vice–President, Communications, MediaLinx Inc. 69 Sarah Anson-Cartwright, Director, Stentor New Media Fund 70 Martin Katz and Marty Behrens, respectively 71 Robert Morrice, Ian Dimmerman, and Paul Stewart represented RBC every year. Major funds sent representatives, including John Aoun of McLean Watson Capital, Peter Tertzakian of Acumen Capital Finance Partners Limited, John Bruce of Ventures West, Mike Cassidy of Digital Frontiers, and Thomas Williams of Whalen Beliveau & Associates. 72 Executive Director, Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund 73 Chair, Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund 74 Financial Director, Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, Member of the Independent Production Fund and the Cogeco Program Development Fund, and Faculty Member, School of Radio and Television Arts, Ryerson University 75 Brian Katz (Primary, Analyst and Evaluator), Carol Parnell (Senior New Media Analyst, Western Region), Audrey Doyle (Senior Analyst, Policy, Planning and Research), Keith Clarkson (Senior Multimedia Analyst), and Agnes M. Zak (Senior New Media Analyst, Telefilm ON/NU) T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA 672 Agnes Zak of Telefilm and Producer Michelle Gay on a group hike up Tunnel Mountain. Interactive Screen 0.3, 2003. Courtesy of the BNMI. agencies that regularly presented included Western Economic Diversification,76 IRAP/National Research Council Industrial,77 and Industry Canada.78 The BNMI had a close relationship with Heritage Canada. Rene Bouchard,79 the director general of New Media Content, attended events, particularly those involving debates about strategies to build a Canadian new-media sector or policy questions about issues such as regulation, Canadian content provisions, copyright, or archival practices. Media associations played a part, including the Alberta New Media Association, which was a sponsor.80 The New Media Business Alliance also participated,81 as did the Canadian Cable Television Association82 and lawyer Peter Miller of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (a sponsor), who made regular presentations.83 The Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) sent its national organizers of 76 Tom Heffner, Senior Development Officer, WED, and Archana Singh, Officer 77 Don Audsley, Technology Advisor 78 Jamie Hum, Director, New Media and Entertainment Technologies 79 He was joined by Norm Jones, Senior Policy Analyst, Canadian Culture Online. 80 Vice-President Todd Paprowski attended, as did President Ian Kelso, based in Toronto. 81 Director, Industry Affairs 82 Shauna McCaffrey represented them. 83 Peter Miller, Executive Vice-President SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK Digital Media—Tom Tapley and Jill Rosenberg—to keep them abreast of momen- tum in the field and to discuss the challenges that performers were experiencing 673 with the rise of digital media. The first Interactive Screen in 1995 was an exciting—if, at times, uncomfortable— clash of cultures.84 The event involved Alliance screenwriters, producers, and direc- tors, including an elite group of Canadian film and television professionals: Chris Haddock, John Frizzell, Peter Mettler, Paul Quarrington, Glen Salzman, Barbara Samuels, and Anna Stratton. These narrative and documentary writers, produc- ers, and directors were placed face-to-face with virtual-reality technology inventors, experimental new-media artists, and programmers. The stated goal was to stimulate quality interactive-media development targeted to a diverse marketplace. It con- nected two kinds of immersive experiences: 3D virtual reality and fiction film and television. It was hoped that traditional narrative participants would be inspired and jump fully into interactive or begin to include web sites, interactive games, or even virtual reality in their projects. Issues of software innovation, production, and pro- duction management were explored. Presentations on interactive narrative, analyses of interactivity, demonstrations of emerging tools for screenwriters85 and future plat- forms (VR, high-speed networks), and presentations of new distribution formats86 were interspersed with presentations by film and television participants.87 Leaders of interactive-narrative development, tools, and theory—such as Brenda Laurel, Toni Dove, Gloriana Davenport, Timothy Druckery, VIACOM’s Donna Friedman, and Banff staff—provided case studies of virtual reality and interactive narrative theory, story spaces, and tools.88 There was time set aside to brainstorm projects in areas such as interactive games and music. Finding a mutual language around narrative in linear 84 I co-chaired the session with Kevin Elliott, then The Banff Centre’s artistic director of Audio Recording and Production. Interactive media artist Toni Dove served as faculty leader. 85 Tools included Story Board Quick, Corkboard, and Story Space. Sessions explored design tools such as HyperCard, Director, and the Banff product ToolWorx (an audio kit). 86 From CD-ROM to cable television/hybrid electronic neighbourhoods and the Orlando Project, presented by Michael Century of CITI and Rob Myers of SGI. 87 Documentary producers Peter Mettler and Glen Salzman screened work. 88 Brenda Laurel of Interval Research and the Art and Virtual Environments Project shared her thoughts in a lecture entitled “Interactive Narrative and Character: A Theoretical Framework and Notes on Practice” with a demonstration of Placeholder, which was intended to explore actual bodies in virtual worlds. Cultural theorist Timothy Druckery lectured about narrative and interactive media. Gloriana Davenport, a respected MIT Media Lab researcher, showed her software for building “adaptive story environments.” Toni Dove presented her “Theatre without Actors.” Amit Parghi and Patrick Maun, two programmers at The Banff Centre, demonstrated online story spaces such as MUDs and MOOs. Brenda Laurel and Harold Rheingold held a brainstorm session on networks as story spaces. Donna Friedman of VIACOM New Media demonstrated Afraid of the Dark, and optional demonstrations included the story-games Seventh Guest and Myst as well as the hard-core games Under a Killing Moon, Quantum Gate, and Zork. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA and interactive forms was problematic and unresolved. Few of the Alliance artists felt 674 a strong immediate incentive to produce interactive narrative works as a result of their Interactive Screen experiences. However, there was a positive trickle-down effect, as a number of the directors and producers eventually developed interactive components as part of their programs, and producer Anna Stratton dove wholeheartedly into interac- tive projects a number of years later.89 The Interactive Screen that followed in 1996 chose a different participant base, drawing together leading international creators in online media and interactive content.90 Although Interactive Screen had been in existence for several years, The Summer Summit at the Summit, created by the BNMI and Real World, raised the stakes of the discussion on business models and monetization, suggesting the need for alli- ances between independent producers, creative companies, and the technology sec- tor.91 It served to frame research questions for future summits. Using the metaphor of the ocean and assigning fish typologies to the participants, we asked attendees what kind of fish they were and what and whom they would like to eat, and assisted them in dividing into “schools” that could undertake strategy exercises.92 Those present shared widely varied interactive creative content, from simulation games created by Chris Crawford and Eugene P. Jarvis to ironic interventions by Natalie Jeremijenko and Marina Zurkow. The summit considered the implications of convergence, asking, “Does convergence mean new markets? Will small fish survive in the dangerous deep? Are there sharks in the shallows?” 93 Geena Davis, Abbie Phillips, and Real World’s Michael Coulson staged a provocative panel entitled “Swimming Upstream Without Pollution” that suggested a new business model; they argued for independent film and interactive media collaboration in order to bypass publisher control.94 There was a reminder of the need for the gam- ing industry to address the female market, dubbed “How to Pick Up Girls.” 95 The summit exposed participants (including Industry Canada, who had 89 Writers John Frizzell and Paul Quarrington also wrote for emerging interactive media over the next number of years. 90 Please review the participant listing to see the range of participants. One who stood out was Tom William, who was an Apple consultant at the age of 14 after he started his games company at 12, and who helped to pioneer Internet music industry. See http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/article805425.ece. 91 A report authored by Anthony Harckham is available in the BNMI archives. 92 In a feat of nature, the fish at one point hiked up Banff’s Tunnel Mountain. 93 From the agenda of The Summer Summit at the Summit (1997). 94 They hoped to produce Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer as a film/interactive experience. 95 This was a panel with Martha Ladly, Interval Research ethnographer Louise Velazquez, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, and Toni Dove. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK subsidized it) to a wide range of strategies, and created an ongoing set of alliances that would play out for almost a decade. Its questions would inform later discus- 675 sions at Producing New Media: Money and Law and Interactive Screen. Starting in 1997, Producing New Media: Money and Law began each year by taking the temperature of investment in the industry and identifying new trends.96 For exam- ple, 2002 featured Meg Hourihan of Megnut.com, co-founder of Blogger.com, who was the inventor of blogging.97 In 1999, the event advertised four streams of exploration. The first was an overview of sources of Canadian and international funding, includ- ing the Canada Council, the Bell Fund, and scientific research (SR) and economic development (ED) Canadian federal tax credits. The second was the financing process, with a focus on crossover works including distribution platforms and strategies for new-media content. The third examined software development, from shareware to public access. The final stream reviewed the legal context, including tort case history and a recent CRTC decision about regulating the Internet. The event addressed artistic new-media content more directly than past workshops.98 A goal was to better relate the content of artistic new media to funding sources. It also sought to create alliances between participants in order to further national and international distribution. Case studies prompted lawyers, financing agencies, and private capital to respond to suc- cinct presentations of business cases. Over its duration, Interactive Screen provided opportunities for project development and pitching; after several years, a one-to-one clinic structure through which partici- pants could receive expert advice emerged.99 Themes included streaming radio; narra- tive structures and projects; physical computing; cross-platform cinema; 96 In 2002, the event began with an overview of the financial climate by Steve Billinger (then of Urbanalie) entitled “Sunny Side Up? What Is the Current Climate For New Media Investment?” The presentation represented both software and content companies. 97 She is also co-founder of of Pyra Labs, the company that launched the Blogger personal blogging software that was eventually acquired by Google. 98 There were presentations on the Canada Council, and program officer Esther Robinson gave a presentation on the newly developed American Creative Capital Foundation, a foundation with endowed funds focused on financing creative works and audience share for experimental projects. 99 These included a writing clinic, a legal clinic, a producing clinic, an educational new-media clinic, a tech-development clinic, a Machinima demonstration by inventor Paul Marino, a documentary new- media workshop, and an audio-in-interactive-media clinic. Leonard Paul of the Vancouver Film School provided leadership in audio design for games, as did Steve Sim, the sound designer/audio technician of BioWare Corp. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA cultural diversity;100 the changing nature of the digital archive;101 research and 676 commercialization;102 the emergence of extended-reality, online, and casual games;103 convergence; and mobile new media. Practical sessions included seminars on writing for interactive media;104 design; audio; business development; budget planning and financing; and legal issues, such as copyright and intellectual property, cyber torts, and localization. By 2002, Interactive Screen had begun to take up debates about open-source and innovation, and featured a keynote on “Rights Commons, Open Source, Public Rights” by James Love. There were structured pitching sessions at the end of the event, where projects were critiqued by faculty and participants. In 2004, the BNMI launched the BNMI Accelerator program, which ran in conjunction with the Money and Law com- ponent of Interactive Screen 0.4. T H E B A N F F C E N T R E P R ES E N T S @ T H E B A N F F T E L E V I S I O N F EST I VA L A N D CY B E R PI TC H From 1992 to 2003, The Banff Centre and then the Banff New Media Institute provided programming for the Banff Television Festival that explored arts television (1992–96) and the emerging world of new-media culture and convergence (1992–2003).105 The motiva- tion was to meld cultures as the BNMI attempted to bring together technological leaders, the potentially disruptive forces of new forms of digital culture, and the mainstream media industries. Through this period, Pat Ferns— 100 In 1998, Mervin Jarman of Mongrel and Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew of SOIL artists’ collective proposed the persistence of cultural specificity online. Ashley Gillard of Interface Radio discussed audiences for pirate radio and streamed radio. 101 The BNMI was a member of the InterPARES Project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. 102 Mark Beam (President and Founder, Creative Disturbance) provided models for research funding. Case studies balanced research and commercial content projects. Kristy Kang, the art director for The Labyrinth Project (Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern California) spoke about financing projects, team structure, and co-production models. In 2004, Mark Resch (CEO, Onomy Labs Inc.) provided an overview of “Innovation-Developing Next-Generation Technologies” and suggested mechanisms for companies to work with researchers from the university and corporate sector in order to spin out possible inventions. 103 It featured Celia Pearce (Celia Pearce & Friends), who spoke about identity in massive multiplayer games; David Miller (Modern Cartoons Ltd.), a provider of children’s and late-night cartoons and related interactive-animation games, who spoke about products; Rob Bevan and Tim Wright of the humorous web-based, extended-reality gaming company XPT (see www.xpt.co.uk and http://blog.robbevan.com/); and Peter Broadwell (Sony U.S. Research Laboratories), who discussed the future of online platform games. 104 Daniel Canty led many of these. 105 I worked closely with executive producer Carol Orr, producer Joni Cooper, and new media events producer Kellie Marlowe to bring this extensive program to the Festival. Marlowe worked tirelessly to build bridges between the two institutions. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK executive director of the Television Festival—intuited that digital and interactive media were implacable forces that had to be reckoned with. The festival sought to 677 attract new-media producers, and succeeded to some extent. A wide range of festival attendees came to the BNMI stream, motivated by curiosity, anxiety, and actual expe- rience in crossover production. Telefilm Canada came forward to partner with the BNMI, with specific industrial sponsors supporting elements of programming. The BNMI sessions settled into three strands—“Fiction and Entertainment,” “Factual/Documentary,” and “Children’s Programming”—and also conducted regular discussions about the cyber economy. A 1998 panel title reveals the per- vasive interest in interactive fiction: “Fact, Fiction and Fantasies: Is There Life in Cyberspace?” explored interactive fiction and online character-narrated websites. Another, “Storytelling: Writing the Big Fiction,” offered the opportunity to “learn from the leading net and digital media wordsmiths.” Another presentation explored “Virtual Communities: Actual Economies,” examining online animated virtual worlds and the growing gaming economy. A session on “Convergence” asked, “How do creativity and visionary content interact with multiple markets and converging delivery platforms for technology and new media?” 106 A 2004 panel moderated by Roma Khanna provided an overview of emerging forms of interactive entertainment, such as “micro-movies delivered over mobile platforms; super-paced multi-player games that hang off well-constructed cinematic narratives; and com- pelling magazine formats with zippy segments.” The panellists shared tactics that could be used to connect broadcasters with technology and new communications companies in order to strengthen technological innovation and experimentation. Children’s media put forth panels such as “Interactive Media Kids: Breaking the Games Ghetto,” which suggested the need for games that offered alternatives to the shotgun-in-corridor genre.107 Factual platforms were explored in 1998 during “Six Degrees of Freedom: News and Information Online,” which asked how the nature of news and information was changing as audiences gravitated to online sources. The session debated whether truth and accuracy were being sacrificed “to 106 Occasionally, research content was presented at the Banff Television Festival. In 2004, the BNMI showcased projects funded by CANARIE that could make use of broadband to bring media to remote locations, provide the basis for international collaboration, and interact with mobile technology and big screens. 107 For more examples, see http://www.banff2010.com/archive/banff2003/sessions/. There are online archives from 2001 onward. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA feed the public’s addiction to uncensored access to material.” 108 In 2004, Jonathan 678 Drori109 moderated a panel titled “Documentary, Where’s the Beef?,” which showcased emerging interactive documentary forms. Of particular interest was Commanding Heights—The Battle for the World Economy, which won a prestigious British BAFTA and was nominated for the first interactive TV Emmy.110 The BNMI provided other events during the festival, including a technology show- case, an offsite party, and a Walter Phillips Gallery exhibition opening of a show appropriate to the festival. One such exhibition was the internationally acclaimed installation The Paradise Institute by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, which represented Canada at the 2001 Venice Biennale and won La Biennale di Venezia Special Award and the Benesse Prize, which recognizes artists who break new artistic ground with an experimental and pioneering spirit. The BNMI provided content for the master classes that occurred at The Banff Centre, which featured digital media and interactive leaders.111 I moderated cyber lunches “co-produced by the Banff Television Foundation and The Banff Centre,” where “leading figures in the new digital age [presented] a vision of the future and issues which we should address.” 112 The CyberPitch program began in 1998 as a co-venture between the BNMI and the BTVF, and I acted as jury chair.113 A BNMI concept, CyberPitch was presented first at the Banff Television Festival and eventually represented a partnership between the Banff New Media Institute, the Banff Television Festival (1998–2004); Festival du nouveau cinéma (2003, 2004); Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (2001–03); Baddeck International New Media Festival; International New Media Festival, PEI; nextMedia Festival Banff 108 See the Banff Television Festival program guide (1998). 109 Director, Culture Online, UK Government and a BNMI regular 110 Howard Cutler (Executive Producer, WGBH) and Curtis Wong (Microsoft Research), who were the creators of the program, provided the case study. 111 An example is “Delivering REAL Interactive TV,” a 2001 master class by Rob Love. The session explored, “What do consumers want from interactive TV? What are the needs of broadcasters and producers in terms of content versus technology? How can interactive TV pay for itself?” 112 For example, the 2002 cyber lunch speakers were Ellie Rubin, speaking as “The Knowledge Deal Maker” on building digital companies; Jonathan Drori on “Everything you Need to Know about Wireless”; Lib Gibson of Bell Globemedia on “Experiences on the Voyage of Interactivity,” a review of changes since the ’90s; and Matt Locke of BBC Imagineering on the potential that interactivity brings to television and experiments at the BBC. My 2004 cyber lunch was “Deep Mobile—From Data to Dating Services to Digital Media,” which explained the potentials and challenges in the mobile market. 113 In 2004, the international jury consisted of Howard Cutler (Executive Producer, WGBH Foundation), Jonathan Drori, Sharleen Smith, and Catherine Warren (Board Member, Bell Broadcast & New Media Fund). SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK (2003); and the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund. CyberPitch forums supported Canadian and/or international winners who were awarded prize money of up to 679 $10,000, donated by the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund. Projects that were eligible for the CyberPitch were designed for two or more platforms and included a broadcast component; associated interactive, digitally delivered productions were also eligible. As the prize matured, the BNMI added a mentorship and guidance component, in which CyberPitch finalists were given advice from the expert jury and rehearsal opportunities that helped to prepare the competitors and ensured quality pitches; this mentorship and guidance component supported companies that were either shortlisted or winners.114 Winners received the opportunity to attend Interactive Screen. Through the Banff New Media Institute, the CanWest Global Television Network Fund established a $100,000 endowment with a $5000 annual award from 2001 to 2006; this endowment established the Global Television Fellows115 to support leaders in convergent media, entertainment, games, media policy, and intellectual property law from across Canada.116 S K I L LS T R A I N I N G In an industry of dot-coms and other start-ups without many precedents, skills were needed: to design new and convergent media; to produce new media and be an effective entrepreneur; and to design new media. Training included project, financial, and budget planning as well as project management. Speakers addressed topics such as managing growth and contraction; finding markets; company structuring and team management; company financing; and future challenges. Some workshops addressed specific verticals; for example, a series on educational multimedia (Developing and Designing Educational Multimedia, 1998) provided skills for this growing segment. 114 Applicants were offered guidance even if their projects were better suited for another forum than the one applied for, or if they needed more development. 115 Winners included Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew, Michel Blondeau, Judith Doyle, and others. 116 The Paul D. Fleck Fellowship, created by the Fleck family to support artists and producers, included the field of new media and provided residencies for David Rokeby and Wayne Dunkley; Mike Stubbs, Gina Czarnecki, and Chris Cran; Ron Wakkary; Minna Tarkka; and Blast Theory. Nina Czegledy, Diana Burgoyne, and William (Wm) Leler also received fellowships, but these were awarded after the time period represented by this book. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA 680 Producer Susan Kennard welcomes participants. Interactive Screen 0.3, 2003. Courtesy of The Banff Centre. The BNMI provided courses in Java, Softimage, and all manner of publishing and design software in the period of 1995 to 1999, intending to produce a generation of artists and producers who were comfortable with emerging technologies and could imagine creative applications for these. Some workshops used beta versions of new tools and provided feedback to technology companies. The BNMI eventually ceased hands-on training in software, as colleges and continuing education programs ramped up to support off-the-shelf software classes. The BNMI supported the annual Writing for Series Television: Screenwriting Workshop for Aboriginal Storytellers begun in 2001 and continuing through 2002 and beyond. The workshop was advertised and registered through the Aboriginal Arts program. It was led by Jordan Wheeler, writer for the series North of Sixties and independent director. It was supported by the Cancom Ross Charles Awards and Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. The goal of the workshop was to bring Aboriginal storytellers the skills to write for series television. Writing workshops entitled Writing for Interactive Media (1998 to 2002) were first led by Michael Kaplan, a writer for MSN, MGM, and other interactive environments and the author of The Puzzling Nature of Interactive Film; later, the workshops were SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK led by Daniel Canty. Distilled elements of these workshops were made available to participants in Interactive Screen. 681 AC C E L E R AT I N G N E W- M E D I A B U S I N ES S ES The BNMI co-production program was an effective support for artists’ projects and for a limited number of companies in Canada and abroad. Other vehicles— Interactive Project Laboratory (IPL ) and the BNMI Accelerator program—were needed. While transcripts from these efforts are not included in this chapter, it is valuable to briefly review their activities and events. The creation of the IPL established effective, formal links across Canada for com- pany incubation, a necessity given the relatively small scale of Canadian indus- try. The BNMI had carefully nurtured relationships with companies, producers, and new-media artists in Quebec and across Canada.117 Canadian Film Centre Habitat leaders participated as mentors at Interactive Screen. Pauline Couture was tasked by Bell and CTV to elaborate the social-benefits program that would result from the merger of Bell Canada and CTV. She held close working relation- ships with both The Banff Centre and the Canadian Film Centre (CFC), and felt that a tripartite entity would be of tremendous benefit to Canada. Wayne Clarkson of the CFC formed an alliance, and with Couture’s support reached out to Louise Spickler, the director general of L’institut national de l’image et du son (l’inis).118 Couture was able to convince Trina McQueen (President and COO, CTV), Alain Gourd (CEO, BCE Media), and then the CRTC of the value of the network. All three institutions gathered to design and deliver the program, creat- ing one of Canada’s most flexible and responsive programs in interactive media. The IPL’s goal was to accelerate “the creative, business, and technical skills of Canadian talent, enabling the creation of viable start-up companies that produce innovative cultural and entertainment works.” 119 The IPL concentrated equally on technology and content creation. It allowed new-media producers—wherever they 117 The BNMI had formed an alliance with the Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal as well as other institutions like La société des arts technologiques and Hexagram. The BNMI provided programming for the Baddeck International New Media Festival and the International New Media Festival, PEI. 118 Spickler was the founding director general of l’inis. She tragically died of cancer at the age of 53 in 2005. She was a generous, award-wining director and producer, and a tireless organizer of Quebec’s audiovisual industries. 119 Habitat and l’inis had a history of significant funding from Bell Canada, as they were in Bell’s territory. Banff had been funded by Telus. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA 682 Participants on the deck of the Jeanne and Peter Lougheed Building, Media & Visual Arts. Interactive Screen, 1996. Courtesy of The Banff Centre. were located—to take advantage of the specific networks, technology platforms, and support systems that the three national “training” institutions—the Habitat New Media Lab at the Canadian Film Centre, the Banff New Media Institute, and l’inis—had at their behest.120 The IPL consisted of three combined supports: Prototype Acceleration, Intensive Development Clinics, and Funding Resources. In its first year, the IPL supported four projects: Anxietyville, a television series and extended-reality web game by Xenophile Media;121 Pax Warrior, a web or CD-ROM Simudoc (and extended documentary that included decision-based simulation and online learning tools) about the Rwandan genocide by 23 YYZee; LopArt, image- creation software inspired by traditional drawing tools, by LopLop; and White Noise, a 3D story that used audio to drive storytelling for Xbox by Trapeze. Mentors provided the project teams with professional advice and shaped the Boot Camp 120 The IPL only supported incorporated companies. 121 Xenophile attributed its move into extended-reality gaming and the content and form of its future award-winning interactive work to guidance achieved at the IPL. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK events that happened across the country. Boot Camp events comprised demonstra- tions of projects, presentations from experts, and project evaluation. 683 In 2004 and 2005, the IPL shifted gears and delivered a national virtual boot camp in order to serve a national base. It used high-speed networks and AccessGrid multi-site videoconferencing technology in the BNMI A.R.T. Labs collaboration laboratory.122 Faculty led virtual sessions in Burnaby, BC, at Simon Fraser University; in Regina at the University of Regina; in Edmonton at the University of Alberta; and in Halifax at Dalhousie University. In 2005, Winnipeg was added to the roster, as well as a face- to-face session in Banff. Projects supported included Geograffiti, In_Situ, Paul Kane Interactive, Project Jabot, Urban Face, and War Hospital. As the IPL matured, it measured its results through specific projects’ success in gaining financing, companies’ ability to create innovative platforms, and the growth of individual talent, who would move on to other projects or companies informed by IPL experience. The second business development environment that the BNMI cultivated was the BNMI Accelerator program, created in order to “provide Western Canada’s digital content and technology companies with support to drive innovation.” Rather than creating an incubator that relies on rent revenues and companies investing significant time in a location, the BNMI provided virtual services and short-term opportunities for companies, with intensive, hands-on management. The primary goal of the program, which continues to this day, was to connect the commercial activities of the digital-media industry with BNMI’s research, knowledge, and net- works. This initiative was a means to anchor the BNMI into its regional commu- nity, creating a balance with its international efforts. It was a vehicle that could commercialize the outcomes that arose in the A.R.T. Labs. The BNMI Accelerator program provided the resources that analysts have recognized as critical to the success of SMEs. It could provide SMEs with applied research to help move their enterprise forward, absorbing risk for them and helping them to sustain innova- tion. It also assisted in matchmaking, provided international market cultivation and outreach support, and provided mentorship and business-skills improvement. Recognizing the importance of completing prototypes in the development phase, it offered prototyping services. 122 This was enabled by the BNMI’s participation in the WestGrid research network and its association with NECTAR (Network for Effective Collaboration Technologies through Advanced Research). T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA W H AT I S I N T H E C H A P T E R ? 684 Most excerpts derive from Interactive Screen, from related smaller events like Beyond Television and Marriage or Divorce? (which were bookend events for the Banff Television Festival), or from the events focused on financing and legal issues, such as Financing Multimedia Software and Content Projects (1997). Discussions on television are reflected in these sources and are also obtained from speciality work- shops that the BNMI held as part of its contribution to a changing media industry. Excerpts on open-source are excavated from the Human Generosity Project summit as well as from a think piece by Simon Pope presented at Bridges II. Excerpts on the growing video-games industry are primarily drawn from Big Game Hunters. Almost two decades after the founding of the BNMI, the preoccupations that are present in the transcripts that follow in this chapter—the future of television, convergence, speed of adoption, intellectual property, business models, story struc- ture, effective user-experience design, strategies for monetizing content, and the interdependencies of content and technology—remain industry challenges, as they were for over a decade at the BNMI. One thing has changed. We can finally dispute Jeff Leiper’s 2005 statement that there is no business model for interactive content. While file-sharing continues, somewhat dampened by digital locks and crimi- nalization, there has been a shift in the economics of digital media. Commercial content can be underwritten through advertising, sponsorship, branded content, and subscriptions, and the application market is a new reality. Technology has made it possible to deliver personalized digital content. The gaming industry has reached out to casual gamers, and women represent a significant force in the inter- active market place. Thanks to Moore’s law, there is a dramatic drop in the expense of starting up in the sector. The clash of television, digital forms, and content has continued, but convergent models are now necessary for the survival of even traditional media industries. N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES 685 The Frontier in Internet History JEFF LEIPER The evolution of the Internet to date has largely consisted of a series of technical and demographic milestones, easily benchmarked and moving ahead at what most would consider a rapid speed in a generally positive direction. More and more peo- ple are connected to high-speed Internet networks every day, while processors and other technology components continue to move at a blistering pace in the direction of faster speeds, greater memory, and other mileposts of similar ilk. Though not the only challenge in the digital age, the question of exploiting the Internet’s reach and interactivity for profit remains a vexing one for audiences and cre- ators—a persistent and difficult issue in the stream of so much progress. In Canada, hundreds of creators have both migrated existing art forms on to the Internet and cre- ated new forms of art that are only possible in the virtual—and now easily shared— spaces on the web. While there is a mainstream commercial market for many forms of visual, performance, musical, and written art, there has not yet been one created for interactive art—unless one considers the significant creativity present in video games such as those developed for console platforms and online (no minor exception!). To the layperson, there are few differences between interactive content and other forms of art. North Americans spend billions of dollars per year on books, movies, dance performances, photography, and music. Yet in Canada and many other juris- dictions, only government support keeps innovative shops in the business of T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA creating interactive content with mainstream appeal. There is simply no line-up of 686 advertisers willing to fund the creation of interactive accompaniments to television shows, no large mainstream box office for digital cinema, and little to no willingness to subscribe to online galleries or virtual theatres. The extent of the problem is well-known to those in the business of selling traditional content. Though oft-cited, it’s worth repeating the axiom that people will spend $2.50 for a 15-second ringtone of shockingly poor quality, but have, for the most part, resisted spending $0.99 to purchase a portable, high-quality digital version of a popular song. In 2005, the amount spent on ringtones in Canada will easily surpass the entire budget of the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund.123 Within a few years, this amount will dwarf the pot controlled by the Telefilm Canada New Media Fund. North Americans’ continued stubborn resistance to paying for content online and advertisers’ resistance to supporting it is frustrating. Government support for artistic endeavours can sometimes be fleeting, and for the thousands of Canadians now find- ing a creative outlet on the Internet, it’s crucial that we reach some understanding of how their livelihoods can be better secured. One of the interesting ways to begin thinking about this socioeconomic ques- tion is to understand what makes interactive content—content found, shared, and consumed on the Internet, in particular—different from other cultural art forms. Artistically, the Banff New Media Institute has been grappling with this for 10 years now, but it’s unlikely that understanding the evolution of narrative or the emergence of a new visual language will provide an entirely convincing explanation for Joe Content Consumer’s unwillingness to shell out to watch digital cinema in any way that might approach industry-building levels. A dollar spent on online content is rarely a dollar spent on new forms of interac- tive storytelling. Rather, we see the preponderance of revenue being generated from new pipes for old media. Hollywood has identified the Internet as a pipeline for its products, and advertising, subscription, and transaction fees favour the content consumers already know. 123 In the fourth quarter of 2004, Canadian cell-phone carriers sold 2.5 million ringtones and recorded CDN$5.06 million in revenues from them, up from 2.1 million ringtones worth CDN$4.13 million in the previous quarter. The number will certainly continue to rise. Figures from the Copyright Board of Canada. See http://www.cwta.ca/CWTASite/english/otherfed_downloads/Tariff_24B.PDF. N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES While interactivity has marked online space since its inception, with the possibil- ity of creating new revenue streams since the beginning, it is only with the rise of 687 trusted digital-rights management technology and new transactional models that video and audio are now important revenue sources on the web; [these sales are] almost entirely for top-down Hollywood product. There are signs that user-gener- ated content is becoming increasingly popular, but entrepreneurs are still puzzled by what potential revenue models there might be for it. No, to understand these economic questions as they relate to culture, we must find another difference between incumbent media content, and one of the most overlooked is the geography in which Internet content is created and consumed. Geography was brought to the forefront of economic thought in the late 1800s and the early part of the 1900s, and remains a critical field of study.124 Yet there has been little attempt to apply historio-economic-geographic concepts to Internet culture. This is to be lamented, but is understandable—since, by and large, the mainstream paradigm is that the Internet transcends geography. We discuss and are coming to fascinating conclusions about how different geography-rooted cultures in the real world interact online, and there is an evolving understanding about the characteris- tics of virtual space with respect to behaviour, but the Internet’s unique geography as it relates to economics in both traditional senses has been largely unexplored—to the detriment of hundreds of capitalistic and entrepreneurially minded individuals who ultimately might help create a sustainable new form of cultural expression. Economy and geography came to the fore of academic thought about culture at the end of the century before last, when Frederick Jackson Turner penned his seminal Frontier in American History. A brief recap: Turner wrote his essay in 1893, three years after the US Bureau of the Census declared the frontier in America closed. That is, there was no longer any significant line of unsettled land to the west—the American empire was now settled from coast to coast, and the “frontier” as a con- cept no longer needed to be tracked. Historians at the time, including Turner, 124 This essay deals extensively with the work of Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Significance of the Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962) as a paradigm for understanding the Internet. For an opposing view of the interplay of geography, culture, and economics, it is worthwhile considering the Canadian counterpart to Jackson’s work, Harold A. Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956). While the two thinkers came to greatly different conclusions about how geography affected (or effected, as both might say) their respective countries, it is most important that we note that both broadened the consideration of history, extending it beyond a study of elites and political power relationships to include geography. For more on Turner’s important contribution to the study of history, read Ray Allen Billington’s forward to the edition cited above. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA Woodrow Wilson, and others were searching for an explanation of how and why 688 a uniquely American democracy had developed. Turner found his answer in the bureau’s pronouncement; seeing the frontier as the unique, defining characteristic of American society, he posited a new geography-based thesis of cultural and eco- nomic development that continues to have a hold on academics today. Turner’s frontier thesis was an attempt to explain the anti-authoritarian, individual- istic, egalitarian streak in America. Today, when we refer to the Internet, it is often as the Wild West—with each of these characteristics. If interactive content distrib- uted via the Internet is ever to find a revenue model that will support it, it will have to take into consideration the cultural values of “netizens.” Those values are rooted in the same forces that created American democratic values. The same frontier that existed in Turner’s pre-1900 US has been extended into cyberspace, with the same movements of people into it. The frontier, Turner wrote, was a wild, uncivilized place where the influence of eastern American institutions held little sway compared to the pressing day-to-day needs of the pioneers who settled there. He argued for a cyclical understanding of settlement that saw pioneers moving constantly westward into the frontier, leaving in their wake the gradual introduction of old institutions such as government and commerce. Those institutions were moving into green fields, he argued, where the previous settlers had adopted more democratic and egalitarian modes of thought. The family unit held sway on the frontier, and individualism was a necessary char- acteristic for survival. Into these settlements came banks, the law, and transporta- tion. Those adapted to frontier thinking, even more so as they continued their own march west following the still-moving settlers’ wagon trails. Frontier culture and attitudes moved back east, as well. The entrepreneurialism and purer capitalism of the west influenced Yankee society, and its culture began to reflect that developing on the frontier. The ultimate result of over 200 years of westward expansion, Turner argued, was an American society that, in its economic, cultural, and social thinking and structures, came to be defined by the pioneers. Mistrustful of authority, egalitarian, and entrepreneurial, American democracy emerged from its risk- taking settlers moving into the unknown in search of a better life for their families. Turner’s thesis sparked controversy—much of it legitimate—that lasts until today. We criticize his thesis partly on the basis that Australia and Canada, too, had fron- tiers, but these developed much differently, with government, advanced social N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES structures such as banks, and other mercantile institutions marching in lockstep with settlers. The march of citizens online, now, provides a new laboratory for academics to 689 test their theories. Beyond an artistic definition of the Internet as virtual space, we can also think of it as socioeconomic space, bound by many of the same rules. In December 2004, an advisory body to the Canadian government—the Canadian Culture Online National Advisory Board—reported its recommendations to officials regarding what might be done to ensure a cultural place online where citizens could gather. Earlier definitions of the Internet and new media for government purposes have never struck at the geographic dimensions in as clear a fashion as this advisory board did. A key feature, still unexplored in any meaningful way, of the board’s report was the inclusion of a Charter for the Cultural Citizen Online. It is reprinted here in its entirety: The defining characteristic of cultural citizenship of the online generations is to be found in the dynamic of active participation. The cultural citizen values Canadian culture for its diversity, including its defining origins in Canada’s Aboriginal cultures and in the two founding nations, and as shaped by the addition to memory of Canadians’ individual cultural heritages and other forces that animate Canadian society. Cultural citizens go online to actively engage. Their initial purpose may be to learn, to inform, to create, to entertain or to be entertained, to exchange or to reach an audience, or any combination of these. However, the fullest engagement is interactive. The cultural citizen expects and enjoys the possibility of choice of content, in particular, content that is Canadian, and he or she is empowered by the exercise of choice. The cultural citizen’s ability to express a distinctive Canadian voice depends as much on the content of online activities as on the technological processes and tools to conduct those activities. The cultural citizen, individually and/or by way of communities of practice and communities of inter- est, enjoys a sense of democratic ownership of public virtual spaces.125 By speaking directly to “virtual spaces,” we see in the Charter a first official definition of the Internet in geographical terms. It is exhilarating as validation that a geo-economic understanding of the medium will yield fruit—culturally and monetarily. Though it speaks explicitly of “virtual spaces,” a fundamental interpretational underpinning of the Charter is that online is territory, with tracts carved out for individuals, cultures, and 125 Final Report of the Canadian Culture Online National Advisory Board, Honourable Laurier La Pierre, Chairman (Ottawa: Heritage Canada, 2004), http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/Collection/CH44-60-2004E.pdf T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA societies. Its defining feature—that it is interactive—is possible because online has the 690 same dimensions as geographic space: people can “move” in it, and find themselves at one time in a different “place” than at a different time. Though the Charter’s framers were likely arguing for a right of access and interactivity with respect to Internet con- tent, the geographic underpinning of the language they chose to use is exciting. If online space is akin to real space, in which many of the same activities occur, to the same ends, we have an opportunity that may not come again, but will be perpetual— to revisit Turner’s frontier thesis in real time. Turner’s grand brushstrokes, no less than an attempt to explain American democracy, might also be useful for understanding Internet culture, and for helping content creators and artists tune in to that culture in a way that does not run counter to its economics. Thinking about the Internet’s geography, it’s abundantly apparent that of the various pat- terns of human settlement we have experienced, “frontier” is the most apt as a model. In many ways, it has evolved along the lines posited by Turner. It is full of unsettled lands that are populated first not by corporations, governments, or even academics (acting as academics). What we see, instead, is individualism and tribalism—the outgrowth of family-centric societies—in the successive waves of Internet settlement. Consider the various means of communication and interaction that have evolved, and continue to evolve, roughly in lockstep with the development of new technological protocols. There have been waves in the past 20 years of new ways to share data—some- times with the utmost flexibility, and sometimes not. E-mail, the web, Internet relay chat (IRC), file-sharing, instant messaging, virtual private networks (VPNs), session initiation protocol (SIP), Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), and the list goes on. Secure channels of communication unknown to any but their creators likely exist in many communities: organized crime, national security agencies, pornography. The Internet is custom-made for new protocols, with its dumb pipes and smart terminals. The first to strike into new territories on the Internet do so for intensely personal reasons, and generally away from the influence of the social and hierarchical institutions many steps behind. The highly technical nature of the Internet is also responsible for the individualism evident on the frontier. New protocols are developed by smart people, and the shar- ing of knowledge back east is slow, though it’s important to note that it does occur. Music file-sharing is an excellent case in point. Early sharing was done using a chat- and data-transfer protocol called IRC, still in wide use today. In 1995, a user wishing to share music would have to execute a long list of steps to do so. The installation N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES of player software found on the Internet, and of the front-end application needed to use IRC, would have been an immediate barrier to use for many laypeople not 691 inclined to become well-versed in the technology. Finding people sharing music was difficult, and downloads were slow. The early pioneers of music-sharing tended to keep their activities hidden from the general public, which was easy to do well away from the web and e-mail applications that were only just beginning to gain mainstream traction outside the halls of academia. Activity, cultural change, and innovation at the edge are never secluded for long, as Turner argued. The frontier one day becomes settled. A bank, a catalogue store— Napster —arrives to signal the arrival of what might be thought of as more rigid social and hierarchical institutions. But that settlement is no longer really on the frontier, as individuals seeking greater freedom, from authority or economic want, continue to move “west.” The march of the frontier in the US, Canada, and elsewhere was limited by envi- ronmental features not found in the Internet geography. There is no ocean to block settlers, and the move west is not slowed by mountains or deserts. In the Internet environment, the frontier moves at the speed of human creativity. Thus, the frontier tomorrow will be far west of where we conceive of it today, and this should remain the case in perpetuity. The aesthetic and culture of the Internet is not isolated. As Turner hypothesized about the interaction between institution and frontier, less adventurous souls move closer to the periphery every day, following the path of the trailblazers. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interfaces, and now blogs, give people the tools they need to stake a claim on territory near, but not at, the periphery. Napster, BitTorrent, and others made music file-sharing child’s play. Installation wizards make using computers easier all the time. E-mail was once the preserve of tech- savvy academics, but is now easy to check from almost anywhere in the world, with giant reservoirs of storage easily tapped into by anyone willing to give it a try. Using tools that were once available only to settlers requires little movement in Internet geography anymore, as at least the web and e-mail are predominant features. At the periphery itself, however, hurdles to movement remain significant. The efforts of the first file-sharers required special knowledge and skills. Perhaps more importantly, they required creativity in seeing possibilities to do something hitherto unthought of. Subsequent waves of “netizens” have benefited from the pioneering work involved in T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA turning a labyrinthine IRC file-sharing channel into iTunes. The corollary of those early 692 efforts might today be the mash-ups created by enterprising individuals with the knowl- edge to hack the code of two separate websites to create something new and compelling. But, in keeping with our thesis, the knowledge is soon accessible to almost all. Not just the technology, but also the culture of the Internet has influenced our settled areas. Music file-sharing is a single but well-known instance. Available to the masses, it has led to questioning about the ownership of cultural product. Debates about copyright have become (almost) mainstream. The free-for-the-taking and communal values of early online communities have seeped into more settled thinking. Online, it’s expected that content will be free, and that what isn’t free can nonetheless be enjoyed without paying by means of technological circumvention—not always as sophisticated as the term implies. Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig’s work on “mix culture” and studies in a similar vein can be consulted for thorough explorations of the issue.126 Other facets of online culture have become mainstream without the mainstream moving any closer to the frontier. Our films, books, and music have been digitally influenced. The raw, amateurish aesthetic of online porn has led incumbent media to compete by offering harder-core mainstream fare. The continuing sexualization of society and the expectation of freedom for sexual thinking have likely been at least accelerated by the easy availability of pornography on the web—whether easily acces- sible, such as the Playboy site, or more hidden, such as the trading sites for consum- ers of pedophilia. Even without going online, our offline world has been influenced by online pornography, with its influences reaching into mainstream advertising, film, and television. The ability to engage online in speech and in activities that are normally frowned on—or even outlawed—offline has inevitably led people to ques- tion the rules and norms of the “real world,” with the result that our offline existence is changing, as predicted in 1893 by Turner. The individualism, mistrust of authority and monopoly, and democratic underpinnings of the Internet are easily understood in Turner’s geographic context, though opponents of Turner’s macho academic thesis will likely find ways to severely test the assertion.127 126 See Lessig’s How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). Lessig’s blog at http://www.lessig.org is a trove of writings, links, and posted feedback. 127 The geographical determinism that many see in Turner’s work has often been rebelled against, especially in countries that were also characterized by great swathes of land not occupied by Europeans. In “Frontierism, Metropolitanism, and Canadian History,” Canadian Historical Review XXXV, 1 (March 1954), J. M. S. Careless argued that the control by elites in the great North American cities is at least as interesting as the democratizing effects of the frontier in understanding power relationships—certainly, in Canada. N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES Online music file-sharing is easily understood in this way, as is software piracy. There is a large-scale trade in games, satellite-TV hacks, high-end (and low-end) 693 software, movies, and other “content” now made freely available to anyone with a moderate knowledge of computers, thanks to the pioneering efforts of the early online settlers. The frontier is bountiful with resources, and the mistrust of authori- ties that would regulate the democratic structures and protocols of cyberspace leads men and women to take what they can. How can other forms of content compete? There are efforts by organizations that profit by their monopoly over intellectual property—such as record labels—to stem some of the tide. Around the world, the Internet is largely unregulated space, due to its size as much as deliberate govern- ment choice. Currently, in Canada and elsewhere, there is a clear backlash by eastern institutions against the frontier developments that they perceive as threatening to their established economic models. In 1999/2000, iCraveTV.com and JumpTV.com were early examples of how the incumbent media would follow the pioneers into the frontier to establish new order. Turner would have recognized the movement westward by lawmakers, and recognized, too, the changed nature of lawmaking as frontier values came back east. Unauthorized Internet retransmission was shut down, but there is no stopping the distribution of personal video recorders, and as this essay was being completed, American-backed satellite radio companies were given access to Canadian airspace. Before the first technologists began charting the possibilities of virtual space, these developments likely would have been nearly unthinkable. Observers will continue to see more and more tracts of space online carved out for the incumbent media, as Turner would have predicted. The key difference now, however, is that there is no foreseeable end to the continued expansion of the frontier. As incumbent media, corporations, and government gain control of one territory, there will certainly always be another to the west, where the next disrup- tive technologies are being created and manipulated. The paradox of the application of Turner’s geographic thinking to online space is that one might expect content on the frontier to become as independent as the cyberspace mentality—yet, for most, content consumption remains rooted in established modes. Established media content is increasingly under threat by piracy, by the free-for-the-taking frontier philosophy. Mainstream entertainment fare is the currency of the World Wide Web, and Hollywood has followed the pioneers with traditional music, film, news, and entertainment content, even though there is little likelihood that it can be made profitable. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA The return on investment for putting movie trailers, fan sites, music-video down- 694 loads, news, and Internet tools online is in the non-virtual world. Even where this is changing, and a movie trailer is intended not to put patrons in real-world theatres, but to convince those same people to download a film, the content is still not new. The most interesting potential for new content that has interactivity at its base is still years from fruition. What is more, interactive content online that is independent of the mainstream is still largely free for the taking. Where revenue models for online content have been established, the mainstream audiences that will be relied on to support them have been ingrained with the idea that this content should be free. Where frontier behaviour threatens established institutions, the government extends its reach—though never entirely to the periphery. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US and proposed copyright reforms in Canada are clear indications that government will establish a presence in cyberspace to protect incumbent media. In our Turnerian landscape, the majority of those trading files and, eventually, full-length movies and television programming, have moved only recently toward the frontier, though they are not on it. Influenced by the ideology of the West, but still eastern in much of their outlook, the bulk of the consumers using applications such as BitTorrent or Limewire can be influenced by the estab- lishment. They have become more attuned to the individualistic ideology of the first Internet pioneers, but are still in a recognizable landscape where consequences for rule breaking are clear and understood. In her book No Logo and elsewhere, Naomi Klein has written extensively about the battle for culture waged by corporate behemoths, and it should be no surprise that as the frontier moves, mainstream popular culture follows with it, and that behaviour that threatens the establishment is either contained or co-opted. There is a flood of high-demand content with high production values available for free view- ing online. Hollywood has understood the frontier mentality very well of late, and the march of mainstream entertainers closer to the periphery is both an example of ideology filtering back from the frontier to the mainstream, and of the move by successive waves of settlers following in the wake of the pioneers. The orderly development of online institutions, rules, and expected behaviours will continue to take place in spaces that are no longer frontier—settled places—just as the towns left behind by the first land-seekers became orderly cities. These spaces are freer and more democratic for having been once untamed, however, and the expectation remains that content on the web, at least, will be free for the taking. N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES Free content, it seems, is the Jacksonian democracy about which Turner posited, updated for the 21st century. 695 The geography defined by the Canadian Culture Online advisory board’s report is at once thrilling and frustrating for cultural creators, since the environment described is frontier. It will be difficult to exploit the frontier for profit on anything larger than a tribal or clan scale, if Turner’s hypothesis holds true in the Internet geography. The transcribed presentations that follow describe money-making opportunities that are reworkings of established modes—new ways to distribute mainstream content, with a nod to the fundamental democratic and individualistic underpinnings of online space, but shy of the individual control over cultural content that is established on the periphery. The ultimate irony is that the disintermediation of the establishment in terms of control can only compete for mainstream, mass attention when govern- ment funds it. There is hope, however, that this will change. Culture has—and will continue to—change, as the ideology of the frontier shapes institutional thinking. With each successive wave of settlement, eastern institutions become more demo- cratic and freethinking in a Turnerian model, which means patience and time will likely yield the best fruits for cultural entrepreneurs. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA 6 TRANSCRIPTS MICHAEL NASH Beyond Television, 1995 MARK MULLEN Beyond Television, 1995 JOHN LOWRY Beyond Television, 1995 DEWEY REID Marriage or Divorce?, 1997 EVAN SOLOMON Marriage or Divorce?, 1997 MARTIN KATZ Marriage or Divorce?, 1997 JOHN WYVER Marriage or Divorce?, 1997 WILLIAM MUTUAL Marriage or Divorce?, 1997 ALEEN STEIN Interactive Screen, 1998 PETER WINTONICK Synch or Stream, 1999 ELLIE RUBIN Financing Multimedia Software and Content Projects, 1997 KEITH KOCHO Financing Multimedia Software and Content Projects, 1997 ANDRA SCHEFFER Producing New Media, 1999 BRIAN KATZ Producing New Media, 1999 MIKE STUBBS Money and Law, 1998 J.C. HERZ Big Game Hunters, 1998 EMMA WESTECOTT Producing New Media, 1999 DANIEL IRON, PHILIPPA KING & BARBARA WILLIS SWEETE Arts, Entertainment and Variety Programs: The Rhombus Story, 1998 STUART COSGROVE Managing Controversy, 1998 PATRICK CROWE Producing New Media, 1999 DANIEL CANTY Survival, Revival Reunion, 2005 MARTIN FREETH Producing New Media, 2000 MARK RESCH Interactive Screen, 2003 STEPHEN SELZNICK Producing New Media, 1999 MEREDITH CARTWRIGHT Money and Law, 1998 CLAY SHIRKY Human Generosity Project, 2001 SIMON POPE Bridges II, 2002 The chapter begins with a dialogue about the nascent multimedia and converged 698 industries.The following dialogues explore the similarities and differences between television and the World Wide Web, with considerations of the differences between linear and interactive entertainment, and of the nature of emerging production models and markets for these. Early ideas of social media or “broadcatching” and a refreshed role for public broadcasting form part of the dialogue. At Beyond Television (1995), Michael Nash shared his thoughts on the content economy, narrative strategies, and the difficulty of foresight; Mark Mullen spoke about the development of realism in console gaming and its impact on audiences; and John Lowry discussed the game and CD-ROM markets. MICHAEL NASH Beyond Television, 1995 Michael Nash / Transcribed: Track 5 34:00–52:00 / Talk: “Why Are So Many Multimedia Titles So Boring? Blame Market-Driven Business Plans but Understand that Interactivity Is Over- Rated. We Long for Connection and Communion in All the Culture We Experience; The Choice to Jump from One Thing to Another Doesn’t Matter Unless the Links between Those Things Matter. Even Though the Playability and the Participation Dynamics Are Profoundly Different in an Interactive Framework, Aesthetic Unity and Emotional Coherence Are Just as Important as They Are in a Linear Form” / Panel: A “Content Tour of the Information Highway” / Event: Interactive Screen Workshop: Beyond Television / Date: Sunday, June 18, 1995, 9:00–11:00 a.m. Michael Nash has been labelled a “visionary” by the Atlantic Monthly. He has an extensive back- ground in new media and the digital transformation of music, games, and film. He was CEO and founder of Inscape, an interactive entertainment and games publishing joint venture with WMG and HBO that won numerous product awards. He was also director of the Criterion Collection, where he worked closely with directors and artists such as Robert Altman, David Bowie, Terry Gilliam, Louis Malle, Nicolas Roeg, and John Singleton on numerous special-edition laserdiscs, the forerunner to the DVD format (1991–94). Michael Nash: We each offer different answers or solutions, so here is my spin. I found this interesting in reference to financial forecast. A panellist at last year’s Digital Hollywood conference said, “Predicting the future is easiest; predicting the present is difficult.” No one really knows where the hell we are right now, but many speak with absolute certainty about where we will be in two to 10 years. We are going to have info-bonds and 500 channels and virtual shopping malls and the oceanside board meetings promised in the AT&T ads. The world’s media industries MICHAEL NASH and entertainment communities have spent the last two years widely speculating about the digital culture of the next century. Some of the players are willing to spend hundreds 699 of millions of dollars; they are going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, just to estab- lish their distribution position for the next generation. Content, we were told in 1993 and 1994, would be king—content in the sense of existing intellectual property. As this idea gained credence, it’s little wonder the publishing and entertainment industry executives got intoxicated with ambition. Yet it is increasingly obvious that the future of new media is not to replace existing media and make available fully interactive versions of all previous media’s content. As The Banff Centre’s history makes clear, new-media forms rely heavily on content from existing media during the beginning of their transition to mass acceptance. For example, radio shows were being put in front of cameras in the late ’40s and early ’50s, and made into television shows. These particular forms don’t supplant the existing forms, and the new forms don’t repur- pose that content for very long. Digitally empowered interactivity will not become the only media experience. We will still go to live sporting events. We will still listen to radio. We still see movies in theatres. We love to listen to music. The new media will layer on top of existing media and change lifestyle patterns over time—the synergy of the personal, social, and technological. The adoption of new technology requires engaging, educating, and transforming the needs of people—bringing them new experiences that they will come to understand as essential. Let’s turn our attention to what it is right now. This is an interesting industry because of the level of activity and speculation about the future, and the faith in the promise the technology will bring. At the same time, talk to anybody in this industry and they will be hard-pressed to name more than half a dozen titles that they personally feel validate this particular industry as an arts practice. Most CD-ROM titles are boring. Why? Blame lazy repurposing efforts, and certainly blame market-driven business plans, but understand that interactivity, in and of itself, is overrated. This is probably an area in which I most differ with some of the com- ments that have already been made on this panel. I believe that we long for con- nection and communication in all cultural experience. It’s great if you can go from A to B, C or D, E or F or G based on what a search engine presents to you. But it is only meaningful if you want to go, and if it matters to go from A to G or A to D. The links between those things have to matter. Even though playability and participation dynamics are profoundly different in an interactive framework, aesthetic unity and emotional coherence are just as T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA

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