During the summer of 1995 I had the pleasure of being a resident artist at the Western Front, researching the possibilities of the CD-ROM medium for live, interactive performance. This project required several kinds of support, which the Front's media curator, Robert Kozinuk, spared no expense of time and effort to arrange. Western Front Multimedia, under the direction of Elizabeth Van Der Zaag, was also extremely helpful, making available not only equipment, software and documentation, but most importantly, the invaluable expertise and patience of Elizabeth, Gordon Durity, Steven Zur and Margaret Gallagher.

In addition to my work at the Front, I was simultaneously engaged as resident artist at Simon Fraser University's yearly "Computed Art Intensive", a three-week learning experience devoted to interactivity. The Winnipeg-based artist Ken Gregory, who was also working in the Intensive, showed me a number of useful software tools for playing video movies interactively. Matt Rogalsky, the sound artist and former "Intensive" participant, pointed me to various software possibilities for interfacing multimedia programs such as "Director" with MIDI. Finally, I had a useful conversation with Karen Henry, curator of the Burnaby Art Gallery. This conversation encouraged me to take a more active role with the image transformation software, and to feel more comfortable in exploring the aesthetic possibilities of image than this musician might otherwise have done.

In a period of about four weeks, I developed a fairly large bank of video movies, a set of still images, and a set of new (at least to me) ideas. I was able to pencil in the outlines of a new composition, tentatively called "One Family's Magic." This ne w work will combine spoken text, image, and music in an interdisciplinary performance context that will perhaps amount to more than the sum of its parts. I also came away from my residency at the Front with a worki ng knowledge of a number of pieces of multimedia software, as well as a better understanding of how the 1990s notion of "interactivity" differs from the earlier notion of "interaction" with which I was familiar as a musician creating interactive music syst ems. This essay is a preliminary account of my ponderings upon the nature of "interactivity", as these thoughts developed during my time at the Front.

I now notice that even a passing mention of the term "CD-ROM" seems to precipitate a quasi-Pavlovian re action, nearly identical among a wide range of people. This response usually takes the form of "So where do I click?" I have gleaned that, despite the relative novelty of the medium, clearly-defined notions are apparently already in place among computer- literate people as to where images are to be viewed (a computer screen), and how a person (now recast as a "user") is to articulate choice (a mouse click on a virtual button). During the early stages in my residency, the popular view of multimedia seemed to be that all one needed do to take part in the multimedia revolution was to assemble a set of images, sounds, animations, and videos, develop a path for navigating through them, and set up an array of virtual buttons to facilitate "user choice" or "inte ractivity." At that point, the first and only meaningful question that a potential viewer need bother asking would indeed be,"So where do I click?"

When Elizabeth Van Der Zaag showed me her CD-ROM, "Whispering Pines", I had to confess that I was at a loss about what to do. "Where do I click?" I said. She said, "You don't know what a rollover is? Every kid knows that." Again, her comment about rollovers pointed up the extent to which grammatically meaningful modes of interaction within the CD-ROM medium were already well established. The power of Van Der Zaag's piece, however, lies in its approach to the construction of personality, its juxtaposition of sound and image, and its relative non-directionality. This openness becomes evident even as a navigational path through the images and sounds emerges through the engagement of a viewer who is definitely not cast by the piece as a "user." The resulting portrait of the love between a person and her environment gives you the impression of a multi-fac eted personality that you can get to know by navigating through the image-sound space.

Despite this excellent example of the power of the CD-ROM, however, I began to realize that my strengths might well lie in a different understanding of the medium. I w as unable to visualize myself or someone else sitting in front of a computer, mousing around between images in my piece. This realization led me to understand that, for the moment, I had nothing to contribute to that particular way of articulating the CD -ROM medium. I began to search for a way that I could extend the medium into an interactive performance context.

Inspired by Van Der Zaag's invocation of the personality and culture of her subject, I began to search for a theoretical grounding for my o wn work with CD-ROMs that would reflect my personal concerns with culture, race, class and oral history. "Changing with the Times" (Lewis 1993a) is a thirty-minute work which I had structured as a modern "slave narrative." Centered around the blues as so nic utterance and as experience, rather than as codified form, this work was strongly influenced by the work of literary theorist Houston Baker (Baker 1984), who has written extensively on the slave narrative as an Afro-American literary form.

Referring to Baker's theory of the "blues matrix", a multiply-mediated background in terms of which literary and musical utterance from the African-American perspective may be interpreted, I began to develop a theoretical performance structure for my CD-ROM piece i n which a blues performer, such as a pianist or saxophonist, could "navigate" through a blues matrix represented by a set of video movies with text that represented aspects of my African-American experience. The experiences, utterances, sounds, gestures an d images seen and heard would become part of a continually self-recontextualizing network of meanings.

Over the years, I have amassed a small library of 8mm videos documenting my travels, my family, my concerts, my world. From this library, which I estimate at about three hundred hours of tape, I selected a set of taped scenes of encounters with my exten ded family, from which I gradually developed a set of categories of experience--such as "brothers", "sisters", "oral histories", "toasting", "justice", " dancing" and "portraits." Using one of the Front's new Macintosh AV computers to capture selected segments from the videos onto (a very large) hard disk, I then used a variety of multimedia software tools to edit and transform them, and to create still im ages from selected scenes. The result, a series of short clips (thirty seconds or less), would represent about thirty minutes of video if played back to back. The final step in this phase of the project was to actually "burn" the images onto the physical CD-ROM.

The next phase of the project, which will be completed later, consists in writing software (using the "Max" programming language developed by my colleague in the Music Department at UC San Diego, Miller Puckette) that will, broadly stated, allow the "mood " of what the blues person is playing to determine what category of text/image the computer will show during a performance. This kind of programming amounts to a type of personal technology, which I have developed in the course of making other in teractive computer works. Perhaps (for example) a "boisterous" kind of playing will select the "toasting" imagery, while a calm, slowly changing sound will cause "portraits" to be shown.

Thus this new piece won't be about the exploration of abstract relationships between sound and image. Instead, navigating through African-American blues experience, using the computer to create and interpret ebony moods, conditions an intuitive social an d cultural environment, where dynamic relationships between music, speech and image can coalesce. The use of computers in this process of musical exploration can be both rigorously logical, and as intuitive and instinctive as breathing.

In describing this vision to some, I discovered that along with the notion of "interactivity", a codependently related, exoteric notion of "passivity" has evolved. Surprising it was for me, a lifelong musician, to learn that audiences sitting in concert spaces and simply listening to music and looking at images was regarded by many among the computer literati as a "passive" activity, of a lower order of interest, perhaps in need of some "interactive juice" from the "viewer."

Certainly it cannot be denied that some kinds of music demand passivity of the listener. Having cut my improvisational teeth at the 75th Street jazz clubs on the South Side of Chicago, however, I have come to realize that, depending on the cultural milie u, audiences can be anything but passive, even if they don't whip out musical instruments and play or sing along . For one thing, audiences listen and respond to each other; in the best cases the experience of music is an intensely communal one. But if we listen more carefully, this gross oversimplification of the interaction between audience and improvisor amounts to a denial of the role of empathy, of independent construction, and of stream-of-consciousness dialogue.

Perhaps we have forgotten how to listen, how to empathize--but then, these things take time. I remember the point-and-click environment of 1960s Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry, where you pushed a button and some machine would move, a computer would play tic-tac-toe--wondrous things. So wondrous, in fact, that the simple fact of being able to push the buttons was enough for us kids. S ometimes we would race through the museum (in those days it didn't cost anything to enter), madly pushing buttons and pulling levers, without taking the time to actually wait for a response, or to see what might develop.

If a imaginatively stimulating and communally informed experience, such as live music performance, is to be considered "passive", while a detached consumer sitting all alone in front of a screen, provided with a set of prefab "choices" to "navigate" between, is considered "interactive", t hen perhaps the real passivity consists in the impotence that we must all feel in not challenging the power that has redefined, according to its own needs, what interactivity means and when and how we will engage in it. Indeed, the rapid development of st andardized modes for how humans and computers may present themselves to one another is unfortunate for such a young and presumably quickly developing technology.

On the other hand, the degree of penetration of concepts like the "rollover" form a compelling testament to the power of corporate media. Of particular note is the important, even dominating role taken by corporate power in conditioning our thinking abou t computers, art, image and sound. One important aspect of the multimedia revolution to consider is how our developing notions about the perception of multiple image streams is reflected in the evolution of language.

Much of the descriptive language surrounding multimedia (and related areas, such as "cyberspace") serves to hide the exercise of power by corporations, ironically through the power to rename. The power to name is part of the power to appropriate, which i s in turn part of the power to define and control. Textbook examples include the metamorphosis of musical terms in the hands of the six giant multinational firms that serve as gatekeepers for over 95% of the music that we are permitted to hear over electronic and recorded media. The term "jazz", for instance, now means very different things depending upon one's degree of exposure to corporate defining power. "Alternative music" was a term appropriated from one truly alternative and marginalized, yet inventive group of artists and handed to another group which, for a number of reasons, is already showing signs of burnout. And so i t goes.

Anyone who remembers the period when "multimedia" did not refer to computers probably also has some notion of the earlier version of computer interactivity in the arts, circa 1975-90, which produced a number of "interactive" or "computer-driven" works. T hese pieces represented a great diversity of approaches to the question of precisely what interaction was, and how it affected viewers, listeners, and audiences. Part of the intellectual excitement of discovery in interactive media was in findin g out that artists, listeners and viewers all had different ideas about how they interacted with their environment. Works were designed in many cases precisely to stimulate this kind of reflection, to explore communication not only or even primarily betwe en people and machines, but between people and other people .

My own approach to the exploration of computer interaction was through improvisation. Inviting the listener, through improvisation, to speculate upon the epistemological and ontological aspe cts of music, is part of the discourse embedded in much of my work with musical computers. "Improvised music" is, for me, that area of music in which the role of personality, feeling and personal expression in music may be most directly encountered. Work ing as an improvisor in the field of improvised music emphasizes not only form and technique, but individual life choices, as well as cultural, ethnic and personal location. Improvisors reference an transcultural establishment of techniques, styles, aesth etic attitudes, narratives, historical antecedents and networks of cultural and social practice. I believe that the study of improvisation will be critical to the development of more sophisticated interactivity applications, simply because improvisation is not only what people do when they play jazz or bluegrass, but also what people are doing when they play "Myst", surf the Net, or decide how to cross Main Street.

"Voyager" (Lewis 1993), originally composed in 1987 and periodically updated since that time, is one of my computer music pieces that is conceived as a nonhierarchical, interactive musical environment that privileges improvisation as a primary basis for musical discourse. In Voyager, an improvisor interacts with a large, computer-driven gro up of "virtual improvisors." A computer program analyzes aspects of an improvisor's musical behavior in real time, using that analysis to guide an automatic composing program that generates complex "orchestral" responses to the musician's playing, as well as independent generative behavior on the part of the system that, while influenced by the improvisor, is ultimately independent of outside input. Thus, a complete performance of Voyager may be viewed as one potential outcome of a negotiation process bet ween the improvisor and the computer.

The notions of negotiation and independent computer agency, central to the Voyager concept, are related to a common trope in folklore, science and art--the idea of music that somehow plays itself or emerges from a n onhuman intelligence. The notion of musical performance on an instrument as a communication between two subject intelligences amounts to a kind of animism (or "magic") characteristic of many spiritual environments. This leads in turn to the notion of "e motional transduction", or the assertion that interaction and behavior are carriers for a complex symbolic signal. Gesture is constructed as an intentional act, that is, an act embodying meaning, and announcing emotional and mental intention. In this way, I believe, the emotional state of the improvisor working with a computer program may be mirrored in the behavior emanating from the computer partner, thus evoking a feeling of dialogue.

This dialogic way of working with computers seems to me to be quite far away from Hollywood-style interactivity. If all you can do now is throw popcorn at the screen, perhaps that is a good thing from the standpoint of hegemonic corporate power. My chal lenge in creating a piece using CD-ROM technology, however, was to retain the animistic, dialogic nature of interaction characteristic of my computer music works. I wished to extend into the medium of interactivity the musical and personal lessons I had learned as a lifetime denizen of the South Side of Chicago, and as a member for twenty-five years of that area's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). I wished, in short, to work with computers in terms of African-American forms.

Interactive art, like any artwork, is susceptible to a variety of readings and interpretations. Moreover, interactivity announces culture, values and attitudes. Computer programs, like all texts, are not "objective" or "universal", but instead represent the particular ideas of their creators; a closer look at a given software system reveals characteristics of the community of thought and culture that produced it. Notions about the nature and function of music are embedded right into the structure of the system.

A case in point occurred during the process of conceiv ing and producing this work. I noticed that a multimedia authoring tool like "Director" appeared not to believe in the existence of real time. Neither would this tool recognize that any input other than the computer's mouse was of any value whatsoever. The various scripting languages and MIDI fix-its appended to this and other authoring tools with which I worked did not provide enough of an escape hatch from the irony of the exclusion of time--which is where interaction really takes place--from ostensibl y interactive software.

When people have problems using computer programs, very often it's not because "they're dumb" but because the way of thinking and feeling, the cultural logic embedded in the program, doesn't fit with their own way of living. To the corporate cultural log ic that produces programs like "Director", it is perhaps inconceivable that a person might want to interact with a computer in a more complex and meaningful way than the "I hear and obey", military model--a model that has become t he standard mode of interactivity. If pushing a button is like giving an order, then compliance (now recast as "interaction") is presumed to be immediate. If compliance is not forthcoming, then society, at least as dictatorial logic can conceive it, has descended into chaos (the computer has crashed).

I came to understand that the term "CD-ROM" had become a metaphor for a construction of interactivity in terms of information retrieval rather than dialogue, creating a set of tropes about interaction whi ch are conditioned in large measure by the relatively primitive and slow data rate of the physical medium. This led to the creation of authoring software optimized to create a kind of interaction which incorporates the compromises necessary to work within the limitations imposed by the medium. To a great extent, this conditioning and compromising process will always occur with any technology.

With multimedia, however, these technical limitations have been factored directly into the popular thinking about interactivity, so that interactivity itself has become defined in terms of the technical problems of the physical medium. It is not difficult to discern the profit motive at work behind this radical redefinition of interactivity. The obvious difficulty in marketing slowly-moving "interactivity" would make such a sow's-ear -to-silk-purse redefinition economically imperative, in order to recoup the enormous investment already made in sectors of the industry ranging from the development and dissemination of authoring and authored materials to the research necessary to create faster hardware and software.

All of this adds up to a conception of "multimedia" for which I was unable to work up any great attraction. In any event, since the use of "Director" alone had proven inadequate for a performance-oriented conception, I was obliged to use different softwa re packages for different stages of the development process--"Premiere" for capturing and editing images; "MovieShop" for image optimization at a data rate suitable for double-speed CD-ROM drives; "MoviePlayer" for easy enlargements of the images (a tip from Stan Douglas); "Toast" for "burning" the images onto the physical disk itself; and "Max" to create software for interactive musical performance with the images. Moreover, as my thinking was to develop, there seemed to be no logical reason not to copy the images I had created from the CD-ROM to a fast conventional hard drive for any actual performance.

In a sense, although I had committed moving, talkin g images to CD-ROM, I had used the limitations of the physical medium--which, we hear, are temporary--to explore the nature of the metaphorical medium. A future generation of authoring tools that might deal more effectively with a complete combination of image, sound, time and input, and that would take into account a wider variety of cultural sensibilities, would allow more extensive collaboration between artists and across media. Combined with technical advances in hardware and software for data compres sion and transmission, the resulting multimedia work could be far more humanistically cross-disciplinary and intercultural than what we are currently seeing.

The problem of embedded cultural particularism also appears in the output emanating from the software tools, and from the popular commentary surrounding these products. In particular, CD-ROM titles dealing with aspects of an African or African diasporan experience are notably lacking. My reading of the current crop of interactivity media products coming out of the USA, including publications such as "Wired" and a lot of the Internet hype, is that they seem largely designed to reflect the sensibilities of that country's white, mostly male, middle-class, 18-to-34-year-old demographic group.

That's a natural consequence of the clear lack of cultural diversity and sensitivity at the development and marketing levels of the institutions that create the stuff--institutions largely staffed by members of that same demographic class. This problem i s often portrayed, however, not in terms of jobs and diversity, but as a purely economic response to the supposed "fact" that this group buys the vast majority of the computers. In any case, many of the games claiming to be "interactive" might be better describe d as "impositional", imposing or propagandizing for values characteristic of their creators.

Such imposition seems to be prominent in the way that behavior is structured and rewarded in many of the interactive games. I remember playing one such game wher e you wound up in a room and there was a lamp and a sword sitting nearby. I said, "So what do I do now?" My friend said, "Well, if you don't take that lamp and that sword you won't last long in the game." Very naively I said, "You mean I'm just supposed to walk into a room and take these things that don't belong to me?" Nowadays that's known as the conquistador model of interactivity. Before I turned the game off, however, I remember expressing the hope that, in addition to celebrating the King Arthur myth, or the search for the Holy Grail--legends long cherished in certain segments of the computer-using community--interactivity might eventually be employed to celebrate other values and cultures.

Interactivity could even be about empowerment--but you might want to ask yourself why a megabuck Hollywood corporation would want to empower a poor schnook like you! Reviewing the debate over interactive multimedia in the business pages of a good nationa l newspaper (in my case, the Los Angeles Times) reveale d that Hollywood executives were largely concerned, not with providing empowerment via alternative narratives, but with making certain that if a narrative was to be provided, that Hollywood corporations would have ultimate control of it.