CANTER: Well, the artists are in Hollywood, using technology. Or in Silicon Valley, they're technologists who act like artists. But there's a lot of envy, and neither one of these industries is willing to get off of their horse and move. So they haven't converged. But they share one thing: They invent a product; they market a product; they sell a product. And once they've got that shmuck they call the customer, they're out of there. And start the whole cycle again. Now the telephone companies and the cable guys say, that's just the beginning, man -- that's like handing heroin out in the schoolyard. Once we've got these kids hooked, it's a whole 'nother game, whether you want to call that support, training, handholding, content development. There's just so many ways to look at where the money is. That's what's missing from this puzzle.
KLUDGE: Isn't that just called "upgrades" in Silicon Valley, and "sequels" in Hollywood?
CANTER: Who's the first person who sours on that? The customer. He knows he's getting ripped off. Even the stupidest people, by Star Trek VII, get it.
KLUDGE: Some developers now say they're just using CD- ROM as a stopgap, a test-bed until interactive TV arrives.
CANTER: Who says that? Not many of them. Most of them are focused on CD-ROM today. There's two companies that call themselves interactive TV content companies -- StarWave and DaVinci Time and Space. All the rest, like Bud Colligan of Macromedia, say, "Oh, yeah, we're ready for the info highway!" but they don't know what that means. They're not out humping AT&T to get the gig to do it. Now, there's a whole separate genre of people -- the shopping channel people, the interactive advertising people, the studios who want to do video on demand -- they're the ones who are focused on interactive TV. But it's not like they also want to do CD-ROM. It's separate worlds for them. I see it all as the same world, in an evolutionary process.
So, while I'm promoting this music video example, I'm also participating in the test runs and trying to get a live show on the road. That will eventually evolve into a permanent venue I call the Media Bar. Imagine the Black Sun, from Snow Crash -- it's something like that.
After all this, by the next stage, I will have an interactive TV development system. Everyone says that what they learned from Macromedia back in the '80s is that "Authoring tools are important!" You can't expect programmers to do all this stuff. Yet AT&T and SGI and 3DO are 100 per cent relying on programmers right now. That's why none of this shit's appearing.
I'm still an expert in authoring systems. I'm not saying I've solved the problems, but at least we're figuring out what the problems are.
KLUDGE: And they are . . .
CANTER: Cacophony. Contention. Latency. Latency's going to be the biggest problem, because of the speed of light. Even if you had the perfect fiber system -- if one guy's here and one guy's there, it takes longer, you know? Why does the Grateful Dead's PA sound better than other systems? Because they have delays to compensate for the echo. And they have a microphone sitting at the main deck which listens to the sound coming in and compensates. That's just within 100 yards!
KLUDGE: How do you answer someone who says, "Interactive music video? I've seen Peter Gabriel's, and David Bowie's, and it doesn't impress me"?
CANTER: Just like we took plays and put the camera four aisles back center, and just like we took radio shows and put them on TV, the music industry is taking liner notes and putting them on a disc. You can't fault these guys; they're doing what they understand. But there are new categories. There's the liner note business, there's this repackaged Tommy business, there's the game business. What I'm doing is completely different -- it's original art. The only other two products I'd say are in this category are [The Residents'] Freak Show and [Pop Rocket's] Total Distortion.
KLUDGE: Say I like music videos, but don't want to interact with them.
CANTER: I feel the same at times during the day -- say, while I'm cooking. There's lots of different types of interactivity -- and one person may do ten types on a given day. But to a lot of people, interactivity is just the ability to say "buy" while you're watching a song.
One thing I learned from working with Todd Rundgren is that interactivity is a wide-ranging spectrum. And way over at this side is where the geeks are -- the controllers and buttons and programs. And at the other side it's called clapping along with the song, or singing along. A lot of companies are building these engines that you pour a song into; the interactivity itself is the same every time. If no two songs have the same melody line, and no two videos have the same images, why should any two interactive pieces have the same interface?
KLUDGE: So the quality of the interactivity is something you should be creating anew each time, the same way you'd write a new melody for a song.
CANTER: Ask what the song's about. If it's about four boyfriends, like "Undo Me," that's one thing; if it's about cultural influences, like "House Jam," then follow that. The next disc will have four completely different songs with completely different metaphors. I won't be using the same lick more than once.
We let technology overwhelm art, and then we get anesthetized. We get our 3-D ball or our color organ thing or 3-D head or whatever it is, and we sit and look at how cool our technology is. Music, though, has these things called the chorus, the bridge, the verse. And it's completely acceptable to shift gears. In fact, Nine Inch Nails really pushes that -- they go from this kind of da-doo-doo-do to YAAAARRRGH. So why can't I go from a 3-D head to a mellow kind of drone thing to some interactive voting? Coinciding with the sections of the song. I'm completely happy with the idea that I'll use everything. I'll use a chrome-plated lawnmower -- but just for that solo. Then, get out of here, I'm not bringing that lawnmower back.
KLUDGE: But every company's looking for a reusable formula.
CANTER: Compare the hundreds of pop bands that had these formulas in the '60s to the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Maybe the Stones were a formula band. But "Bitch" was completely different from "Brown Sugar" was completely different from "You Can't Always Get What You Want."
KLUDGE: What about artists who reject interactivity itself? Who say it's their vision, and they make the choices, not the audience?
CANTER: Yes -- today, being an artist is about making those choices for people. The breakthrough is going to be when the artist realizes he can let the user make those choices. I think, in the long term, we will be able to craft those choices just as much as we've crafted the single linear work -- artists will be crafting those branches. Now, getting there is a tradeoff: which choices do you want the user to make? And how do we make that fun? What the naysayers argue is that you don't have to, and people don't want to, so why? I say, if it is possible, then we should at least explore it.
KLUDGE: How?
CANTER: I can certainly imagine us all voting on a Letterman top 10 list. Or, when there's only four minutes to talk to a guest, the audience might want to vote on which questions to ask. Right now David Letterman and Larry King have to make those decisions.
KLUDGE: Who writes those questions?
CANTER: Well, that's where David Letterman comes in -- he's the expert in questions. But he's gotta cull 20 minutes of questions down to 4 minutes. Or what if an artist shows up at a gig and, bored with his set list, he gets the audience to choose which songs he should sing.
KLUDGE: So when can we expect all this?
CANTER: I've basically written off the rest of this century. I'm much more interested in what's going to happen on the other side than in what's going on now. Which is just different people fighting each other to find out who's going to be the infrastructure.
I have to remain agnostic, cause we don't know who's going to win. But we know that they can't patent music. They can't patent interactivity. They can't patent video. So we focus on them in a kind of pure state. I'm just trying to get the angle of my howitzer right for the long shot.
download (via FTP) Media Band demo (Macintosh file, approx. 1 MB)
visit the Mediaband Home Page
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