Digital stories need a human voice

CRESTED BUTTE, COLO. - "I loved those stories," the woman in the row behind me at the Center for the Arts here said to her friends. "But what the hell made them digital?" Her perplexity was understandable. Last week this tiny town - with a population of 1,000 people gasping for air at 9,000 feet above sea level beneath snowy Rockies peaks - hosted the First Annual Digital Storytelling Festival. And the three dozen or so participants from around the country had spent four days asking one another exactly the same question.

The Sunday night show began with three performers: Jo Carson, a playwright and storyteller whose starkly honest vision grows from rural Appalachian roots; Marty Pottenger, a carpenter who's also a kind of bard of New York City working people's lives; and Firesign Theater member Peter Bergman, whose work combines Beat-style wordplay and post-hippie media subversion.

They were all clearly gifted in the craft and mystery of narrative - but what did their work have to do with computers? The final performer, Bay Area multimedia artist and festival organizer Dana Atchley, put the question to rest. For his "Next Exit," he knelt by a video campfire, spun stories from his life and illustrated them with videos, photos and sound from a vast family archive - mixed live on a Macintosh, then projected on a big screen.

The low-profile festival - Mark "Spoonman" Petrakis, who hosted the performance, called it a "funky pee-wee digital powwow" - served as a summit at which community-based theater artists and pioneers of interactive storytelling could exchange their visions and expertise. Fascinating stuff - but hardly the sort of thing technology companies like Apple and Radius, which sponsored the event, normally worry about. They're paying attention because of a powerful new idea, a dawning digital-age gestalt.

Two or three years ago, as the multimedia industry came to understand that hardware and software were only a means to an end, the phrase "content is king" became a popular cliche. Profit-seeking execs took this to mean that they needed to purchase every palace in sight - to assemble vast hoards of information, as Bill Gates, with his purchase of the Bettman Archives, seems to intend.

Today, though, we're beginning to see that "content" is so much dead data until a human being's perspective and artistry give it life. In the kingdom of digital media, content is merely the subject; story rules.

The phrase "digital storytelling" nonetheless took its share of lumps during the festival. Pedro Meyer, whose 1992 CD-ROM "I Photograph to Remember" first showed the medium's potential for moving personal art, argued that calling works "digital stories" because they happen to be stored in a computer was as silly as calling words on paper "ink stories." And Bergman offered this routine on stage:

"Let me tell you a digital story: 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0 . . ."

"You did that one last night," came a catcall from the audience.

"No, that was 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1 - this is digital improvisation."

Some festival participants argued that the deepest impact new technology will have on our culture will be in the area of distribution, as the tools for telling and selling stories spread into more people's hands. Others maintained that digital media will transform the nature of stories themselves, allowing for new kinds of interactive art whose final shape we can't yet imagine.

The Internet, which would barely have been mentioned at such an event a couple of years ago, loomed everywhere on this visionary horizon. At the very least, the rise of the World Wide Web might cut out the middleman to allow direct artist-to-audience relationships. Beyond that, by allowing individual and group stories to flow more freely through space and time than ever before, it suggests a blurring of the very distinction between artist and audience. This was a festival that practiced its own preachings: Over the course of the long weekend, participants built their own site on the Web. Sponsored by the Net magazine, it's full of theoretical musings, tall tales and narrative experiments (at http: / / www.thenet-usa.com).

One question that split the group was whether a Net-based exchange of stories can form the basis for new human communities. Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen of the San Francisco Digital Media Center described the "Home Movies" workshops they sponsor, where digital novices learn to make short desktop movies in one weekend, and envisioned a hopeful future of mass-generated mass media. Carson and other speakers suggested that communities form around a shared sense of place - and that new "virtual communities" might enhance but never replace such local bonds.

Such abstractions flashed into immediacy when Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayevsa described a personal dilemma: whether and how to record the stories of his conservative village. To do so might betray them to exploitative outsiders; to choose not to might mean they'd disappear forever. For such quandaries, no quick techno-fix seems likely.

If the festival emerged with a single principle, it was the idea that narrative - as old as the hills and as new as the latest multimedia experiments - is native to the human spirit. As digital technology matures and lands in more people's hands, finding, telling and absorbing stories is what most of us will wind up doing with it.

As computers throw overwhelming quantities of information at us, stories will be how we make sense of the torrent. Information, valuable as it may be, is something for machines to process; stories are what people read, experience and understand.