II. XPLORA 1 AND EARLY SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
In the 70's the album cover became a form of interactive art and the strongest marketing tool for record companies. In the 80's it was music video and MTV. In the 90's it will be interactive multimedia 6
As 1994 progressed, announcements of new music CD-Rom projects began to appear weekly in American, British and Australian music press. Along with artists such as Prince, who had nailed his flag to his mast by announcing a deal with Sega as early as 1992 7, a variety of old and new, established and emergent artists announced their intentions to explore the new medium. As might be expected, even dead artists got in on the act, with CD-Roms offering companies new opportunities to exploit the deceased star market. One of the more notable examples of this was the American company Comptons New Media (a company specialising in CD-Rom encyclopaedias) signing a deal with WEA to produce a John Lennon CD-Rom including audio, photos, 55 minutes of video and unreleased music and writings 8.
Of the first batch of CD-Roms, the most commercially successful has been Xplora I, a disc produced by software designer Steve Nelson in collaboration with Peter Gabriel. Remarkably, given the size of the market, by mid-1994 Xplora had sold more than 100,000 copies globally (with sales of 2,000+ in Australia - an impressive number given that sales of over 1,000 CD-Roms in Australia are currently considered a 'hit') 9. The disc - and its success - are significant for the manner in which they represent a conscious combination and 'outgrowth' of previous elements of the music product packaging discussed in section II above. In this manner, and however successfully, Xplora I - as might be expected on such an early product - represents a tentative foray into the new format rather than a more radical and imaginative enterprise.
The initial idea for the Xplora I CD-Rom was developed by Steve Nelson while working as a software engineer for Apple's Advanced Technology group in California. A devotee of rock music, Nelson was considering the potential for the CD-Rom in association with music when it struck him that he could take some of the readily available ingredients of his favourite albums - the video, the sleeve artwork and the music itself - and sample them into a prototype version of some of the interactive software he'd developed. (Ward: 37)
The album he chose to produce a prototype CD-Rom for was Peter Gabriel's So (1986). A demonstration of Nelson's prototype impressed Gabriel to such an extent that he set up a new division of his record company Real World - entitled Real World Multimedia - to co-produce a CD-Rom with Nelson's new company Brilliant Media (released as Xplora 1 in late 1993). The division was also established to allow Gabriel to further develop his career as a dedicated multi-media artist (as opposed to a singer/composer who simply uses multimedia).
The most significant phrase in the reference to Nelson's concept cited above, and in Nelson's approach to the original demo for Gabriel, is its reliance on "readily available ingredients" (ie videos, artwork, the music). Xplora 1, like the majority of the Australian music CD-Roms discussed in the following section, uses previously produced and independently 'functional' music videos as (one of) its prime (animated) visual ingredients. Combined with this are three further levels which make Xplora 1 more than simply a 'CD-Rom of the album' and more of a general demo piece for the CD-Rom's range of possibilities and Gabriel's own musical endeavours and enterprises. In addition to the various videos from So (Digging in the Dirt etc.); the disc contains three other sections which can be accessed via a menu based on a graphic of Gabriel's face. These comprise: a documentary resource on Real World Records (including behind the scenes footage of the WOMAD festival); a directory of various styles of World Music associated with Real World Records; and a personal file on Gabriel (including information on his activities with Amnesty International).
Such levels clearly take Xplora 1 beyond being simply a set of ancillary visual packages and pathways to the music. Indeed, in many ways the music becomes a (literal) pre-text for much of what is shown. Despite this, Xplora 1 also includes elements which allow the user to creatively engage with the pre-produced music tracks themselves. This approaches the facility musician/producer Todd Rundgren singled out as the most significant for the for the format in, arguing that
| Music and other presentational art forms have always had this strict agenda about how you experience them. New technology has made it possible for you and me to have two different viewpoints on the same piece of music.(cited in Baig:3) |
This is most evident in the sections which allow the user to do (basic) re-mixes of the track Digging in the Dirt - apparently 'helping' (real) sound engineer Richard Evans. This is of course a highly limited and prescribed from of interactivity, reflecting Nelson's view that:
| I don't think there is such a thing as interactive music. We want to create an interactive experience of which music is a huge part...it's a fundamentally different thing ...it's a shift. Now the audience can be part of the performance rather than passive watcher-it takes a different mindset (cited in unattributed (1994a) |
The notion of engagement with the performance (as both represented in, and articulated by) the CD-Rom is one which has been explored in a number of ways in subsequent CD-Roms (such as those discussed in section III below). As developments in software and the size of budgets increase, this approach is likely to be a key element in the popularisation of the form.
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