A rant by Robin James, editor of The Cassette Mythos

We are a nation of specialists, a gazillion sources of light, no two snowflakes alike, with wonderfully ordered webs of gathered kindred spirits and spies. Observers and exhibitionists. The perfect match!

Where is your website? Aren't you hooked up?

Its really a patriotic duty, participating as a citizen of the world, expressing yourself clearly and taking part in the many dialogs of our peers, our world. A Holy Mission. Part of coming of age. You aren't really living now if you are not publishing your own web pages yet. Succombing to the urge to create: Playing your music. The quest for sharing ones vision, for explaining one's self, for putting ideas Out To BE SEEN in a big anonymous way. Lots of people. Random wanderers. Seekers who want to see what you have. One person can make a website, mine for example, or thousands of people can work on one, MSN (MicroSoft Network) probably may be the largest number of people working on one web-site.

What can compare?

What came before all this internet madness?

Writing the great American multimedia novel. Writng your own software programs. Getting the Coyote to chase the Roadrunner across the screen. Having it played on millions and millions of computers. Once or twice.

Creating slide shows. Images, colors, all sizes. Painting rooms and creating environments.

Radio broadcasting, talking to a microphone that only listens, your voice going off into the atmosphere. You can prepare all kinds of wonderful things, pre-tape entire hours, or assemble many small components to put together on the fly, that is what radio broadcasting is like. News broadcasts have no allowance for chance or improvisation, except for mistakes. And then there is live performance art. Poetics, music, beds of audio background to put voices over. Special sound effects for radio plays. D-Jaying a dance is in the same general area as radio broadcasting, but I have never done anything like that, so I can only lie or speculate about the disco experience.

Dance, except as a visual art form, and other body-motion arts are artforms probably the least influenced by computers. Images of dance, and music fare well in digital form, and motion images are somehow representative. Maybe those crazy headbaskets will bring about a new dance craze for internal consumption only. People responding to invisible signals. What a strange emporium that would be.

Making a Zine. Who can, or will read your zine? You advertise it in the best places. You leave it in the record store, the Laundromat, the bus station. who is going to read it? The audience now: people with computers of various types. All with telephone hookups to the internet. And some time to kill, curiosity to pursue. Or to go to one zine over and over and over again.

So now, potentially, you can put video, audio, various kinds of animation, 3-D graphics, photographs, live video still captures, things you set up and leave for others to find, things you can fiddle with CONSTANTLY. Or almost as constantly as reason permits.

What did you do all day? What should you do all day? What would you rather do all day? What should we all be doing?

Being able to work with color and words, just think if everyone made thirty or forty pages a year, what a... huge wealth of material we'd have. What is the cost in terms of making these pages, lost time doing something else, working maybe? What was work, 9 in the morning until 5 at night, what is work now? Try finding it now without using computers. Hobbies are what you do on your own time, not for hire. Maybe the government will pay us for cranking out cool web pages. Who is going to look at all this stuff? What do you make available to them?

What we did before the internet was:

Thought about making videos, or films. Get a team together, make a film or rock band, and articulate a vision so precisely that everyone is instantly enlightened or amused. Everyday twice before lunch.

Watched more television. Passive absorbtion. Watched whatever was on. Watched our own videos. Moths attracted to sexy mirrors.

Created Illuminated Manuscripts in the Scriptorium with the Brothers.

We made a picture, a cartoon, decorated a letter or story, then tried making these things in a huge series, new ones, better ones, putting groups of things together. Thinking of every detail.

Making a magazine, either just you or your class, or your friends, or your imaginary empire. I usually don't like poetry, but, we just have to learn to get along together, right?

Write music. Arrange sounds. Write lyrics. Improvise jams. Make audio recordings. Maybe its some kind of sonic poetry. With and without an audience.

Little hand made packages. Your band on tape, you got a photo or some kind of visual icon or symbol that re-enforces the musical themes, photos of the members of the band. Lists of other recordings, a retrospective accumulation.

That is where we said "here we are now", and then where we were, on our mountaintop, looking up at the next and the next and the next, which got us to where we were then.

We are driven to make the artistic momento or expression, or whatever your way is. The best way is not to try to make THE ONE THING, rather make a series of versions of things, many many things. Todays thing, last years thing, the completely different thing. We have the means of production.

Part of the spirit of this partaking is to be able to make lots of them, to share them with more than one friend, and part of the spirit is to be as personal as possible, photographs, drawings, one-of-a-kind accidents that are xeroxed and shared. Combinations of many things, the legendary multimedia. Operas may have been the first multimedia vehicles. Orchestras. The best things seem to be combinations of cool elements, like cassettes in boxes with pictures, writing, spray paint, stencils, bright colors, all kinds of special gee-gaws.

Suddenly, we have all these different kinds of art smeared together in HTML. Color backgrounds, our oldest friend Text, PLUS color images and communication-enhancing devices like email forms that tuck in anywhere, click, write to us right now.

Some of the most obvious bad parts:

Waiting for images or any kind of big (or for that matter, average sized) multimedia file to download.

Sound is kind of clunky. RealAudio (http://www.realaudio.com) has the right idea, playing during the download, but the quality is still a big problem. And why do they call those QuickTime flicker-blobs video? Most moving images can look horrible.

Worst of all, computers require successive larger and larger investments. We are instilled with a desire for the most Herculean devices available, which are openly intended to be made instantly obsolete by larger and larger Juggernauts. Each job folds into the next project and the one after, again and again.

Ready for my transmission?

Visit the Cassette Mythos website: http://www.halcyon.com/robinja/mythos/aaaa.html