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By Scott Rosenberg
"Let me introduce you to my parents."
The invitation comes in a calm, Spanish-accented voice. Its owner, Latin American photographer Pedro Meyer, might be sitting right next to you, talking into your ear, as he shows you pictures of his mother and father.
In fact, his words and photos are digitally stored on a CD-ROM -- the new species of compact disk that the software industry is starting to use to distribute all kinds of information and products. But the moment Meyer begins speaking to you at the start of "I Photograph to Remember," his memoir of the death of his parents, you forget about the computer, the disk drive and the screen. You're simply hearing someone else's story.
Much of the time right now, multimedia -- computer-based storage and retrieval of text, sounds, still pictures and videos -- means one of two things: jazzed-up encyclopedias or hot-rod video games. Meyer, like a number of other innovative artists in the Bay Area and around the country, is after something entirely different.
The first wave of memorable, creative work in this new high-tech medium circles back to the most essential and primal artistic act. People are using computers -- once viewed only as the cold face of an impersonal future -- to tell the stories of their lives and preserve their memories of their families.
Multimedia artist Abbe Don's pioneering "We Make Memories" presents a century's worth of family history through the eyes of four generations of women, all captured on a laserdisc you navigate via a Macintosh. And in "Next Exit," Dana Atchley -- a self-described "old hippie" turned electronic bard - -sits by a "video campfire" and uses a computer and a video projector to illustrate his tales from an adventurous life on the road. ("Next Exit" serves as the keynote for "Home Movies" -- a six-week series of performances and workshops on "the electronic family album," led by Atchley, Don, performer Mark "Spoonman" Petrakis and Harry Mott of the American Film Institute.)
These works don't fit the flashy, explode-in-your-face norms of the typical multimedia work. "I Photograph to Remember," for instance, doesn't offer dazzling graphics or slam-bang special effects -- in fact, it's all in black and white. Its story moves in a straight line and its "interactive" possibilities are limited: You can listen in English or Spanish.
Instead, "I Photograph" offers a different sort of complexity. It brings the nuances of human emotion into a new medium, simply and subtly exploiting some of the technology'a characteristic traits. What the computer biz calls "a new platform," artists tend to see as just another variety of canvas.
I first encountered "I Photograph to Remember" on a crowded trade-show floor, where its steady voice and monochrome humility didn't have a chance of making an impression amid the general ruckus. But Meyer's work is easily obtainable as a CD-ROM from the Voyager Company, and once I brought it home, it bloomed. Its photo-and-voice account of Liesel and Ernesto Meyer's double battle with cancer is hardly the stuff of light entertainment. But its intimacy, honesty and clarity won my attention and respect more fully than other, more melodramatic or self-conscious versions of similar stories that I've seen on stage and screen.
In some ways, of course, what these artists are doing is simply carrying over into a digital format the genre of autobiographical solo performance -- the kind of storytelling-from-life that Spalding Gray and many other artists have turned into the one growth area in live theater today.
As Atchley puts it, "The need to pass on stories, or to pass on even one story that validates your life, is important -- it ties the generations together, makes us see that we are part of a continuum. And the power of the image to reconstitute memory is wonderful."
In "Next Exit," Atchley both inhabits and spoofs the archetype of the campfire storyteller. While video flames flicker on an old rabbit-eared TV set, he squats on a tree-stump at the front of his Army Street studio, waves his "air mouse" at his computer and begins to dip into tales from his family's past and his own patchquilt life -- anything from his father's exploits as a ham radio buff to his stint in the 1970s as an itinerant counterculture artist known as Ace Space, who traveled the land in a mobile home collecting bizarre images from the roadside.
Atchley's biography reads like a cautionary tale for the video age: His career as Ace, presenting a live multimedia slide-and-music performance called "Roadshow" to everyone from farm town audiences to college students to celebrities, abruptly ended when he sold Hollywood the rights to his story and his pictures -- for a film that would never get made. "A victim of image bondage," he now calls himself, only half-jokingly.
He wasn't completely image-less; he still had the rights to his own obsessively self-chronicling family's archives, which stretch back 150 years. (If you want to put together an electronic family album, it helps to have a lot of pack-rat relatives.) He had a background in the conceptual art movement. And he had a ton of fancy video equipment from the TV production work he did through the 1980s to pay his bills. The computer was just the final piece of the puzzle -- the one that made all the others fit.
In some earlier incarnations, "Next Exit" was built around videotapes that tended to straitjacket the performer's routines. But now that he's gone all-digital, Atchley says, the technology has caught up with his need for onstage spontaneity: "Now it's more of an improvisation, like jazz. The nature of this medium is recombinant -- it's not cast in stone, it's not a tomb, and it will change as long as I have my voice."
In the Atchley family, the artist's mother is a supporter of his high-tech attic-rumaging -- she's even coming to do a workshop with him, he says, on his 53rd birthday. Meanwhile, his father remains a skeptic: "He refers to me as, 'My son Dana, who likes to wallow in his past.' And he says that nothing puts people to sleep faster than somebody else's home movies."
Which, of course, raises the old complaint about autobiographical art -- that it's neurotic, self-indulgent, narcissistic. And of course it often can be, particularly when the autobiography outweighs the art. On the other hand, in the torrent of fragmented information that the digital revolution is dunking us all into, the maelstrom of factoids and contextless images and disconnected texts, we're going to want to hang on tightly to the stories of our own experiences -- to keep them intact and dry. Other people's stories, in turn, may become one of the few sources we can trust. And the patterns revealed when many people tell their own stories are likely to provide some reassuring anchors as the info-tide rises.
In the "Home Movies" workshop series, Atchley and the other guest artists will show their work and then guide participants through the process of composing their own digital stories using whatever photos, film and video footage, mementos and writings they might bring. Atchley says it's as much an exercise in "information management" as in creativity: "We've moved from a society that essentially documented a series of single images of lives, or in my grandfather's case maybe four or five hours of moving images in his lifetime, to people who record four or five hours of moving images in the first eight months of pregnancy."
For anyone wondering what the video kids of the future are going to do with all the footage their parents bequeath them, Abbe Don's work offers a hopeful model. Don grew up listening to stories from her great-grandmother, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, and in "We Make Memories," she set out to recreate that experience.
By the time Don began making the piece, her great-grandmother had died, leaving behind a treasury of scrapbooks. Using them and interviews with her grandmother, her mother and herself, Don was able to assemble "Memories" -- an absorbing tapestry of narrative inherited from mother to daughter, through which Don lets you find your own way. At each point on a timeline she sets up, you can click on each of the four women's faces to hear stories on similar themes (education, romance, marriage, childbirth and so forth) from each of their perspectives.
When she showed "We Make Memories" in public, Don found that the piece worked as a catalyst: People would view it and approach her with their own stories. To accommodate such responses, she created a complementary installation, "Share With Me A Story," which allowed visitors to input their own old photos and record stories to go with them.
Nothing about "We Make Memories" is inaccessible -- except, of course, that it demands a Macintosh and a laserdisc player, and right now you can only view it when it's on public display (as it was in 1992 at Berkeley's Judah Magnus Museum) or if Don shows it to you in her home. The artist says she's looking into ways of distributing the piece more widely, perhaps in CD-ROM form.
"One of my pet passions was to make it as simple as possible," she says. "You don't have to know anything about computers, multimedia or video documentaries. It's very easy to get technolust -- to be seduced by what you can do. You have to ask, is this something that's true to the piece, that's helping get it across? If it isn't, you have to let go of it, no matter how cool it is."
Don admits, ruefully, that computer-oriented people sometimes complain that they can't "do anything" with "We Make Memories." In one sense, they're right. The piece's "interactivity" level is relatively low, technologically speaking -- there aren't many buttons to press.
But the buttons aren't the point. If "interactivity" turns out to be just an elaborate demonstration of what computers can do, it's going to get boring fast. What's interesting is how artists use the technology to communicate and interact with us.
It took two decades from the invention of the movie projector in the 1890s before D.W. Griffith showed the world what it was invented for -- and redirected people's attention from the capabilities of the machinery (watch that train move!) to the breadth and depth of what he could express with it. As Brenda Laurel and other multimedia theorists have observed, when it comes to computers most of us are still in the staring-at-the-projectors stage. The electronic family albums created by Don, Atchley and Meyer represent a first, easy step out of that state -- one that we can all imagine taking.