In a round table discussion on National Public Radio about the Internet, I caught a remark to the effect that to some, the word "interactive" means a button on your TV that says "buy." We are being inundated daily with commercials showing glimpses of soon-to-be telephone technologies. Radio shows are being cobroadcast on TV. A call-in interactive children's show, Moxie, where a cartoon character can respond spontaneously, has been offered by the Cartoon Channel. As the communications media of TV, radio, computers, and telephone merge, a host of issues (both pragmatic and philosophical) emerge. The organization of all of this information and resource is changing in nature.
We used to watch a handful of TV channels. In your viewing area, you would get to know the flavor of each one—though they all essentially tried to offer the same thing. The main qualitative differences were between local and network offerings. As cable grew, we began to see some degree of specialization such as The Learning Channel and MTV. We now see a high degree of specialization emerging. We have The SciFi Channel, The Comedy Channel, The Romance Channel, The History Channel, and so on. Similarly, on the Internet where Gophers used to point to just about everything, they are becoming specialized—for example, the Ceramics Gopher and the History of Science Gopher. On the Web this has advanced to highly specialized home pages such as the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Collision with Jupiter Information home page (http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/sl9/sl9.html).
It is difficult to predict the state of art on the Internet even five years down the road. While analogies can be drawn from the development of home and business computing over the last decade, much of what lies ahead has no previous foundation. It would be somewhat like being able to predict the existence of WinGopher years before Gopher or even Windows existed. The rate of expansion on the Internet has been accelerating so dramatically that I would not be surprised to see it as a subset or parallel set to an equal or considerably more powerful system. Many of the obvious commercial ventures are already being suggested. That ad on TV where a mechanic or a doctor receives long distance assistance can be easily substituted with an interior designer viewing your living room and instantly displaying custom tailored computer generated designs. A make-up artist or a clothing designer might work with your features and show the new you on-screen.
Will pure art have to compete with a self-indulgent, commercially-driven interactive media, or will channels exist to promote and support experimental ideas? Will the experience of art become removed from the public through confinement to a video display or a printed output, or will it become closer to the public by being more readily accessible? The world has a handful of serenely beautiful sculpture gardens. These are very special places where children and adults can walk within or upon art works and thereby experience the artist's vision in an all encompassing way. Would a virtual tour through a garden satisfy or compel? The ultimate challenge for future artists in this realm will be to bring experiences that are real to what will be otherwise a cerebral plane or viscerally stimulated plane.
