abstract:
The writer draws from his experiences both as an artist and as an electronic
information designer for three metaphors that introduce lessons applicable
to development of cyberspaces, especially musical and therapeutic ones.
The metaphor of the Neighborhood invites examination of one successful method
for an artist and a group to construct a neighborhood mural. The metaphor
of the Garage provokes examination of the garage band which continues to
hold appeal and focus the creative energy of youth. The metaphor of the
Porch introduces issues of development for one special needs group, senior
citizens.
Delivered at the First Conference of Cyberspace in Music Therapy, New York
NY, February 1992 and first published in its Proceedings. During reading
of the paper this slide was projected:
The Neighborhood, the Garage, the Porch: Healing Spaces of Home
The technology industry is blessed with a voracious appetite for metaphors
over the years, around which to shape its development. Xerox PARC's desktops
and file folders, Apple's HyperCard cards and stacks, Brenda Laurel's theater
metaphors [1]--all help influence the creation of coherent systems of tools
of empowerment. I wish to illustrate some possible directions and models
for the creation of cyberspaces and their musical components with three
reassuring metaphors taken from daily life, from imagery of the home. As
I take cyberspace to mean a shared arena of consensus that only exists electronically
[2] many of its design and philosophical issues can readily be compared
to architecture and urban planning. The first of these metaphors is that
of the neighborhood, and some of the lessons neighborhood arts might bring
to technological development. The second is that of the garage, the realm
slightly outside of the house (and its standards of orderliness) where tinkering
and twanging can go on undisturbed. The third metaphor is that of the unhurried
yet sociable front porch, private property yet interface to the street and
neighborhood.
1. The Neighborhood
San Francisco's Tenderloin is a noisy, clamorous urban neighborhood. Many
appreciated the social service agency as a place of refuge to sit, to snooze
(you don't sleep at night if you're homeless), to think, talk or read. There
was surprisingly little reading, and it was here that I first became aware
how pervasive illiteracy is in this country; many of the clients simply
could not read. The neighborhood had a high population continually interfacing
in and out of the mental health system.
My first exposure to community arts was here, when I was hired to teach
art skills--drawing, printmaking and mural painting--in this service agency's
neighborhood drop-in center. Community or neighborhood arts is contextualized.
It depends on its world, the shared assumptions and history of that world
to be understood; a world outside of that of the mainstream, for the mainstream
art market is based on the artwork as a mobile, rootless commodity. Whereas
the ethic and aesthetic of studio art that I had carefully learned in college
was one of exclusivity, this context demanded inclusivity, affirmation of
every voice. Whereas "the art world" cultivated specialization
and esoterica, here all could take up a breadth of skills and styles but
your audience sought and expected some communicative value in your work,
something that spoke to them and their daily lives (even if it was a painting
that offered a clear escape from its urban difficulties). The community
arts movement that was active in the late 1970s in San Francisco involved
communities not served by the downtown art institutions: Black, Latino,
Asian and Gay. The Neighborhood Arts Program was even initiated by the Arts
Commission in response to protests by these excluded groups on the occasion
of the the funding of the new Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall. The most challenging
type of artwork for me in this world added elements of interactivity and
collective creativity, community murals. [3]
By "community" I uphold the political definition put forth by
Saul Alinsky [4 ] and others as a group with both immediate and long-term
shared interests. Community art thus puts the artist's role into an unalienated
context, and tests her or his professional flexibility; an artist may occasionally
be as frustrated with artistic problems in this role as one alone in the
studio but will never feel isolated and alienated. The artist gives form
to content shared and developed among others, in a relationship of artist
and audience new to our society but the standard in many traditional cultures.
For the purposes of my metaphors I will here use "community" and
"neighborhood" interchangeably.
I gradually developed a procedural model for artist and community interaction
in the painting of a neighborhood mural that I call the "Tennis Game".
Like a game on a neighborhood playground, the leadership role in each step
of the process bounces back and forth, from artist to community, back to
artist, to community and so on. Though all the participants are involved
in both the design and painting process, I here define the "artist"
as one who is educated in the history and craft, and brings to the project
her or his set of professional skills. This process maximizes the use of
the skills of both the professional artist and the untrained neighborhood
group of participants that will live or work with the completed mural. The
Tennis Game method proceeds through clearly defined stages of responsibility
that shift between the artist and the neighborhood.
First of all, the neighborhood initially expresses its desire for a mural,
and begins to look at its potential site differently from that moment on.
Here they contact an artist.
In the second step the artist steps in, introduces her or his own work,
provides historical examples. These may be slides or shared pictures of
the murals of Pompeii, Bonampak, Renaissance frescoes, Los Tres Grandes
(Rivera, Orozco and Siquieros) of Mexico, local examples of murals and the
artist's own. The group begins to evaluate these works as achievements of
which they too are capable, even considering imagery and aspects of ancient
or classic works to quote. The artist helps the neighborhood participants
develop an educated eye before the research and drawing begins.
Third step, the neighborhood examines its reason for painting a mural, thinks
about itself, of what it's proud, the community context of the mural. To
ask "What do you want to see?" usually will result in suggestions
of second-hand imagery--the latest television craze, a pop celebrity or
local sports hero. If the question is phrased "What is important to
you?" the neighborhood will examine itself, its strengths and its motives.
The sports hero may reappear, but as an example to youth as a kid from the
neighborhood housing project that worked hard and made good. Sketches are
brought in, photographs from their own albums, or from magazines. The group
realizes its imaginative resources, its own imagery and even the world of
imagery to adapt and use and assemble in its own localized context.
In the fourth step artist then employs design skills to assemble the imagery
into coherent form. Suddenly it looks like Art! Symmetry, balance, and the
scale of each image are given attention and a unified look. Perspective,
if any, is established, diagonals and a sense of movement, perhaps a spiral
of imagery.
Yet the neighborhood group must be able to look at this possible design
and see it as theirs, so the fifth stage is their critique and improvement
of it. They now have one or more concrete visualization of possibilities
to evaluate. Their newly heightened aesthetic awareness supplements the
artist's, due to their own familiarity with local content and context. They
offer their changes, refinements to be incorporated into the design, and
approval. They also aid with any preparation of the wall as necessary.
For the sixth step the artist then draws the design upon the wall with chalks,
graphite or china markers, rapidly applying her or his learned skill. This
drawing stage can be the most frustrating to non-professionals. The original
drawing might be squared-up for accurate transfer to the wall, or drawn
upon it more or less freehand. The latter process can have an organic quality
caused by human scale, by the arcs of the arm like the Vitruvian man within
the circle. Lines must be readable to all participants, yet not coloring-book
confining.
The neighborhood group then actually paints the mural as the seventh and
often longest step. The artist provides suggestions for color-mixing and
the development of value range, teaching the use and abuses of outlining
and the visual push and pull of foreground and background. Most of the art
instruction the artist provides here grows out the solving of specific problems,
as on the job in any workplace. Brush care and cleanup may need to be taught,
and an example of perseverence, motivation and energy, for the process often
feels like housepainting until the wall is completely covered with paint.
It can be difficult convincing participants that there is such a thing as
underpainting. By this end of this step all can satisfactorily say that
they painted their mural.
In the eighth step the artist paints finishing touches, perhaps lettering
if any, some outlines, shadows and shadow edges and highlights. Definition
is provided by a unifying hand lightly lain.
Finally the group varnishes the complete mural if necessary. The neighborhood
celebrates and dedicates their mural, perhaps on an ethnic holiday. Neighborhood
unity has been enhanced, and the event brings it publicity and possibly
contacts with local politicians seeking photo-opportunity. Yet the process
has raised political conciousness through group accomplishment; if we accomplished
this, what issue can we tackle next? The mural now becomes part of the neighborhood
history it may depict, as well as beautification and decoration. The neighborhood
lives with it, and how the mural lasts and is respected often reflects the
success of the Tennis Game process.
This process could be applied to the creation of therapeutic sound-spaces,
using electronic tools for the shaping of music and sound environments rather
than paint on firm architectural surfaces. A community mural affirms an
environment by enhancing a wall of it with artifice; the creation of a cyberspace
does the same through electronics. The engineer designing and programming
cyberspaces could incorporate user design input and adaptability in an incremental
development process adapting the Tennis Game. What steps in the development
of cyberspaces can be identified, and how can they be "bounced"
back and forth between engineer and user? What skills of cyberspace implementation
can be readily transferred to the layperson who'll use the space? The goal
would be the creation of a musical, therapeutic cyberspace that its users
felt was theirs "from the ground up". Incorporating a wide range
of generalized, detailed, collective, personal, quirky and even sometimes
clichéd audio into a coherent unity would be a design challenge analogous
to the visual artist's challenge on a neighborhood mural. And the de-mystification
of the engineering process might be as fulfilling as the community muralist's
sharing of the artistic.
A cyberspace for music therapy could then be like a neighborhood in several
ways. Labyrinthine, multifaceted, multifarious, polyvocal, it would provide
through its complex structure of audio imagery an arena of identity, both
group and individual. May it affirm and reinforce that identity more gently
than the peer-group conformity sometimes enforced in neighborhoods of our
youth. The cyberspatial neighborhood must give its user a readily-understood
sense of context and location. This would be the affirmation of a space,
its sense of history and relation to other locations and their inhabitants.
Like the boundaries of a neighborhood, a virtual space might exist largely
defined in the hearts and inclinations of its residents, imperceptible to
any outsider unaware of subtle sensory clues.
2. The Garage
Bands were springing up all over. Physical music, music made beef and
pork, music made snake. Rock n' roll is argumentation with a beat. Rythm
n' Portents. While little boys and girls on the curbs and cul-de-sacs played
beetles and mealworms, we wanted to be the Beatles. With steadfast determination
we continued our obsession with squaring the circle of Rock.
Chords chafing over guitars like bee-wing vibrations. Two chords are better
than three, the use of only one is best of all. Drums rumble patter like
stockinged feet. Music so suburban it still often had the sound of pots
and pans, pegboards going up in a garage workshop, electric sanders, Beethoven's
gluegun, sonatas of spar varnish being applied to picnic tables. Mockingbird
bass. Abrasive drums. The sting of the drums.
What Will the Neighbors Think? (they dug it). Song like the moan of a distant
chainsaw, snow-blower, lawnmower. The drive-in movie about Rock was called
"They Came Out of Some Garage". If we opened the door only cars
and station wagons passed by, or people's little brothers and sisters. We
had frittered away the Summer, but we were sharpening our rifles. Now let's
get serious and conquer the world, this world in which they judge a man
by his guitar pick. Ours was the Garage of the Popes.
--from the novel Fun [5].
There are two ways in which the metaphor of the garage is appropriate to
questions of cyberspace and music therapy. There is the prevalent romantic
Silicon Valley myth of electronic technology being developed in the garage,
on a shoestring budget offset by plenty of optimistic inventiveness. In
the spirit of Henry Ford (and the recent movie "Tucker"), from
Bill Hewlett and Bob Packard in sleepy Palo Alto through Steve Wozniak and
Steve Jobs getting their Apple I ready to show to the next meeting of the
Homebrew Computer Club, the myth lives on. The Technology Center, a museum
in San Jose, California, is even housed in a building it calls "The
Garage". It is a particularly American mythos, that of invention and
collaboration, little guys showing up established Big Industry, and soon
doing very well financially by doing good things with their better mousetrap.
Yet there is also another garage myth, slightly more rebellious, of suburban
teenagers with affordable electric guitars and amplifiers and drumsets assembled
in a "garage band", both practicing old standards for the highschool
dance and assembling their unique and original vision of the Future of Rock
and its attendant fame. This may be a form of music self-therapy in the
creation of a collaborative refuge from the social disquiet of adolescence,
too often an extended liminal and meaningless state.
Much attention is being paid nowdays to the phenomenon of the men's group,
a variety of men (usually middle- and upper-middle class) coming together
in unconventional ways. A popular activity of these gathering is a drumming
circle, where the joy of collective activity and ordered noisemaking is
celebrated. Somehow I see this as an attempt to recapture or substitute
for the "garage-band bonding" of teenage men. In a Fall, 1991
visit to Philadelphia's Franklin Institute I stepped inside the music room
and started playing one of the two electronic sets of digital drumpads.
After a while, a guard came in and played a bit on the second one. We improvised
together wordlessly in the big glass booth, and went back about our business.
I have seen this occur in the musical instrument booths of San Francisco's
Exploratorium as well. Perhaps world leaders should begin their diplomatic
meetings by playing a bit of music together.
The community feeling of the neighborhood and the egalitarian arena of the
garage can also merge in wonderful ways. Two decades ago in highschool I
was in a group which played humorous, original country-western songs on
three occasions for patients in the Northville, Michigan, Mental Hospital.
Each performance--for women, for youth and for the criminally insane--was
a time of excitement for them, for participation, for a certain communion
between us. One elderly woman sat down at the piano after I played our songs
and proceded to play fine stride and ragtime, the staff surprised that she
hadn't done that before. One teenager, perhaps frazzled by one to many acid
trips gone bad, pulled from his pocket a crumpled paper with chords for
a song he'd written, delighted a borrowing a guitar and appreciative ears
for a few minutes. One middle-aged Black man, who'd pleaded insanity in
a homicide case, took the guitar and hilariously parodied an elderly drooling
Delta blues musician. In each case the presence of musical instruments and
musicians elevated the patients' status and affirmed their creativity and
individuality in the locked and inevitably limited institution.
For in any virtual garage--digital or "analog" like our visits
to Northville--peers come together to jam, to create something more than
the sum of the individual parts. Here the experiences of the organizers
of prison bands or music programs for any disturbed or marginal youth need
also to be studied.
Traditional instruments like violin and even the piano are not as "generous"
as digital ones (whether commercial or, like the Franklin Institute's, site-specific),
demanding a longer time and discipline committment to produce sounds that
meet expectations of the music they have heard skilled musicians produce
upon those instruments. Philosophical questions arise: Do those in need
of therapy most need the discipline of the "real"? If it sounds
like music, is it music? And if it feels like space, is it space? Debates
rage on about analog and digital instruments' sensitivity and subtleties,
yet many contemporary electronic keyboards have the capability of multitrack
sound-on-sound recording, even sampling. In a workshop teaching the animation
program Macromind Director [6], people grasped the soundtrack-assembling
capabilities immediately, cutting and pasting audio segments in various
orders, well before mastering the animation of visual elements. The auditory
may be the part of our environment we seek or gain control of most quickly.
Marshall McLuhan has written [7] of the "hot" media of radio,
engaging in a way the cool cerebral visual medium of text and image can
never be. Other writers have reintroduced the metaphor of the gaze in discussing
how cyberspaces may inadvertantly replicate the sexism of the larger society
[8].
Yet perhaps the cyberspatial garage should be a visual realm as well as
auditory. The visual aspect of rock n' roll has an importance similar to
the actual form of the music--witness the success of opera in the nineteenth
century, or of MTV today, or how picture histories of rock n' roll performers
are so evocative. Chamber quartets (with the exception of San Francisco's
Chronos Quartet) rarely think about "look", hairstyles and tailoring,
uniformly adopting the formal dress--signifying the upper class and their
servants--consistent for nearly a century. Art schools have always been
centers of rock n' roll banding, and Art Rock--with its greater attention
to fashion, text, and new instrumentation and technology--has been long
acknowleged as a continuous genre. Those who manipulate visual elements
in dress, with paint, on stage and architecturally will all inform the field
of cyberspace design.
Much of music is based on mental spatial relationships, and the classical
Greeks taught the discipline as a part of mathematics. The ability to "jam"
or improvise or transcribe a known song to a different key demands this
spatial sense, and technological augmentation of the spatial qualities of
music might reinforce that. A cyberspace environment might inherently spread
diffuse boundaries, like sound itself.
Virtual instruments might exist imbedded in the environment. The Mandala
Sytem by Vivid Effects of Toronto [9] has been used to combined the user's
movement in space with visual iconographic controls. The user, positioned
before a video camera, can play a variety of virtual drums, which she sees
pictured surrounding her own image upon the computer screen. Has the Mandala
Sytem been tried out in a therapeutic environment? How would the autistic
children behave in a world where every move produced a musical response?
How long before its cybernetic responses encouraged them to actively control
this tuneful world?
In another combination of music and virtual space, a graduate student studying
with of Michael Benedikt, Professor of Architecture at the University of
Texas, designed a virtual record store. [10 ] The student's proposed three-dimensional
real-time interactive mercantile space consists of a great gridded tube
into which the browsing shopper flies, the tube displaying on its interior
the covers all its records while playing them in an indistinct cacaphony;
as you approached a specific record, its music would grow louder and distinct
and shut out the sound of the others.
A cyberspace for music therapy might be like a rock band's garage as a realm
of participation and permission, unencumbered by rules, the private collective
space safe from prying ears (No "Turn that down!"). Here music
can be its interface for tools of reflection and empowerment. All can become
peers in the great equalizer, cyberspace, and all can be in control of one's
world. As a laboratory for aspirations and dreams, a place where experimentation
rules, the virtual garage continues earlier traditions as a place to create
scientific instruments, or of joyous song extruded from musical ones. It
must be a safe place for the marginal to gain strength--especially for youth,
often impoverished and underappreciated inventors. A virtual garage could
be linked by phone lines, in which isolated patients could play together
with no sense of violated boundaries. To try on new dandified persona, and
to dream together, like rockers do.
3. The Porch
The front porch. A social yet protected place to perceive and involve oneself
in the passing world, to be involved as you want to be. Involve the passers-by
in conversation, simply nod in greeting or glare if you so choose. My elderly
father speaks of seeing, as a young man, retired President Calvin Coolidge
wave silently to him from his porch in Vermont. In one sense it is a stereotype
to see the porch as the realm of senior citizens ("old rockin' chair
got me again") yet on the other hand there are many ways it has served
their needs for generations. Perhaps now the porch suggests a third metaphor
for hospitable cyberspaces, a place friendly to senior citizens.
Senior citizens' special needs as a group become apparent in various kinds
of interface testing. In the case of the personal computer, the importance
of precisely positioning visual elements must accomodate bifocal eyesight,
especially with non-light emitting screen display technologies [11]. Solid
principles for effective animated onscreen information for any audience
like clarity of text, minimal onscreen movement at any given time, a strong
sense of priority among visual elements are all especially crucial for seniors.
In 1988 The nephew of a grand old muckraking journalist, the late I. F.
Stone, wrote to Apple Computer, Inc. that Stone had typed his final book
The Trial of Socrates on the Mac in 12-point Chicago font, easy on his failing
eyesight [12].
Similarly, the world of musical cyberspace tools must acknowlege the hearing-impaired.
NASA Ames Research Center has demonstrated a device called a Convolvotron
for synthesizing three-dimensional virtual acoustic displays in real time,
separating sound into spatially recognizable component sources, reconstructing
an illusion of space [13]. Perhaps we might eventually see Convolvotron
hearing aids, dissassembling what to the impaired ear is a murky and unreadable
mix of ambient sounds, and reassigning simulated spatial locations to numerous
real-world (traffic, voices in the room) and simulated sources for an orderly
audio environment.
Those in academia and industry who communicate frequently by electronic
mail on the computer or terminal on their desks ("on the Net")
swear by it and depend on its single channel, a gray line of text. It is
a particular delight to get an immediate response to a message, to know
that miles away someone is reading what is written and is moved to immediately
type a response. Specialized computer bulletin boards now give a sense of
community to the physically isolated, and one specifically designed for
seniors is SeniorNet, developed at the University of San Francisco. Inviting
musical spaces for seniors with limited mobility could alleviate loneliness.
As many seniors face loss of short-term memory. A cyberspace might augment
that, where a single murmured word--or its synonyms--could access information
branches in sound environments. Perhaps a communication space in which the
user was encouraged to sing her message would aid memory retention, in the
ancient bardic tradition.
Furthermore a community's social memory could be augmented and preserved
in the virtual medium. Memory spaces would be a logical extension of oral
history projects. The vocal narrative could be given spatial illusion by
the appropriate sounds, music (Big-Band or ethnic-specific), even smells
and virtual tactile sensations. The visual component to the space might
be extrapolated from old photographs stored under the bed--Here's San Francisco
on V-J Day in 1945!. Reconstructed memoirs in cyberspace is a genre seeking
its Marcel Proust.
The creation of such cyberspace projects could be a cross-generational,
involving the grandkids. Using the structures of hypermedia, the experience
could access those of the children or grandchildren, drawing parallels while
strengthening the bonds between generations. Virtuality will help seniors
of limited mobility move beyond prevailing stereotypes of old folks at home,
and cyberspace developers' efforts will empower yet another group of diverse,
creative, and active individuals to do things previously not considered
possible or feasible; with luck and temperate habits, someday we'll all
be members of this long-lived, empowered group.
A cyberspace for music therapy will be like a porch to the extent that it
is a space both private and public discourse. Generous and user-friendly,
such a space will give its user, however physically and mentally challenged,
a gentle sense of home and its security. As a social space it must offer
all participants a quiet conviviality, not noisy or demanding, where one
may expand or limit participation as one chooses, or may sit back and observe
or listen undisturbed. Finally, as a memory space the virtual porch is a
place with firm roots, yet a good place from which to look outward.
4. Summary
Much work is to be done towards new interfaces and shared digital information
spaces.
Though we seek maximum participation in their design, among other demographic
factors there are different kinds of participation for different age groups.
In teaching Computer Graphics to 18- to 22-year-old adults I notice that
most the semester they are most comfortable with exercises that involve
following directions rather than those demanding creativity and originality.
I contrast that with my class on Comics for gradeschoolers, who have overflowing
creativity and no hesitation to express themselves in comics' visual, narrative
language and conventions. In the latter setting, "comics jams",
where one kid quickly draws one panel of a comic strip and passes it on
to the next, helps to promote egoless cooperation. This kind of exercise
might be a creative icebreaker in the interface design process with users
of any virtual technology. Perhaps the best tools with which to equip the
developer of such unprecedented media with are flexibility and creative
thinking. The teaching of cyberspace development skills remains a challenge
ahead.
In suggesting the metaphors of the neighborhood, the garage and the porch
I draw upon experience as an artist giving form to my own content, as well
as that of a designer giving form to the content of others. I work to link
and coherently assemble my own experiments in community murals, collaborative
musical performance and interactive hypermedia literature into expressive
new works and prototypes. I contemplate "muralworld" interfaces
with virtual surfaces decorated with complex figuration, possibly assembled
through a community process [14]. Any and all of these projects could be
adapted by the therapeutic practicioners to meet needs of specific users.
Therapy awards its patient new responsibilites, as well as a new irresponsibility
and affectlessness--a safe place to try things out, things that might not
always work; the traditional domain of the artist.
Musical therapeutic cyberspaces should be given the virtues of the neighborhood,
the garage, the porch of an ideally comfortable remembered place of innocence
and experience, rest and development. So much electronic communication is
active, assertive, the business call or search of the database, and this
is the "productivity" market for which developers usually develop.
Yet much of communication is therapeutic, in the words of the telecommunications
slogan, to "reach out and touch". Like the hospital, we pass through
our cyberspaces as necessary to convalesce, to repair and nurture what is
damanged, to recapture something missing. For after all, the goal of all
this technology, empowering in times of strength and healing in times of
upheaval and disorienting change, is to bring us all safely home.
--February, 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
Slide Image:
Mural, Holly Courts Housing Development, San Francisco, CA. Politec Acrylics,
22' x 24'.
Dedicated July 1980. Funded by Mayor's Office of Community Development,
City of San Francisco. Whitewashed out by City of San Francisco Housing
Authority, October 1980.
(c) Mike Mosher 1980.
Footnotes:
[1] See Laurel, Brenda, _Computers As Theater_ (Addison-Wesley, Reading,
MA, 1991).
[2] For two definitions of cyberspace, I like the zen-like phrases quoted
by John Perry Barlow at the First Cyberspace Conference, Austin TX, April
1990: "where you are when you're on the phone" and "where
all of your money that's not in your pocket now resides".
[3] Mural funding generally came from the Mayor's Office of Community Development,
though for eight months 1980-81 I held the city's last full-time CETA-funded
muralist position. For further history of San Francisco murals funding see
Drescher, Tim, _San Francisco Murals: Community Creates Its Muse 1915-1990_
(Pogo Press, Minneapolis, 1991).
[4] See the books by Alinsky, Saul _Rules for Radicals_ and _Reveille for
Radicals_.
[5] _Fun_ © Mike Mosher 1990. All rights reserved.
My unpublished novel of a rock n' roll band circa 1970.
[6] Workshop at Apple Computer, Inc., Cupertino CA, June 1990.
[7] This is the central thesis running through McLuhan, Marshall, _Understanding
Media_ (New American Library, New York, 1964).
[8] Raised in several occasions in presentations of the Second Conference
on Cyberspace, Santa Cruz CA April 1991, and the Virtual Seminar of the
Bioapparatus, Banff Art Centre, Banff Alberta Canada, October 1991.
[9] Vivid Effects, Inc., 317 Adelaide St. Suite 302, Toronto, Ontario M5V
1P9. (416) 340-9290. I saw the Mandala system demonstrated by Vincent John
Vincent in performance at CHI '90, the Association for Computing Machines'
Computer-Human Interface Special Interest Group conference in Seattle, WA,
March 1990. The Mandala System is not to be confused with Jaron Lanier's
"Mandala" programming language discussed in Rheingold, Howard,
Virtual Reality (Summitt Books, NY, 1991), pp.158.
[10] Thought I saw this in Prof. Benedikt's presentation at the first Cyberspace
Conference, Austin, TX, May 1990, it is discussed in his illustrated essay
in Benedikt, Michael (ed.), _Cyberspace: First Steps_ (MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA, 1991).
[11] Mosher, Mike "Seniors and the Macintosh", in Apple Viewpoints
(Apple Computer, Inc., Cupertino CA) November 1, 1989. This newsletter--since
discontinued--was sent to certified Apple developers.
[12] From an in-house publication circulated in 1988 by the Customer Relations
department of Apple Computer, Inc., in which Stone's name was blanked out
but his best-selling book's title was not.
[13] Demonstrated by Durand Begault at the tour of of NASA Ames Research
Center's Virtual Environment Laboratories, Moffett Field, CA, January 24,
1992, on a tour for the YLEM Artists' organization. See also Wentzel, Elizabeth
M., "Three Dimensional Virtual Acoustic Displays", NASA Technical
Memorandum #103835 (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Ames
Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, 1991).
[14] Mosher, Mike, "Community, Imagery and Technology: Lessons for
Interface Development", lecture at Bay CHI (local Computer-Human Interface
group of the Association of Computing Machinery), January 14, 1992. Other
works by the author that develop this direction include the computer-assisted
multi-image musical performance piece "Christopher
Cumolonimbus" at SCAN '91 and the S.F. Exploratorium 9/92: the
Eleventh Annual Small Computers in the Arts Network conference, University
of the Arts, Philadelphia PA, November, 1991, and the presentation "The
Three C's: Comics, Community Murals and Computer Graphics" at SCAN
'90, Philadelphia, November, 1990.
