MultiMedia_Dialog

Multimedia Dialog

Despite, and perhaps because of, our familiarity with the new digital tools, it is all too easy to lose sight of their potential. All representation and communication, no matter how it is physically manifested, is means for human expression. The digital computer, when combined with the optical scanner, the music sampler, and a myriad of other computer input devices, allow us to reduce all physical media to virtual binary digit. When sound, or photographs, or film, or sculpture become digitized, the traditional boundaries separating them become erased.
This erasement of boundaries allows the creative interlocutor to work across academic and artistic boundaries which would have traditionally hampered him or her. Every digital movie, and every digital image, every digital sound is nothing more than a squeeze of ones and zeros stored in the memory of the computer. These numbers can be seamlessly combined and juxtaposed by the creative interlocutor. In the computer’s virtual spaces, all forms of communication are equal.
Educators might use models such as that of Vitorino de Feltre of Mantua cross-disciplinary institutes to free them from the dogma of rigid academia which prevents them from reaching through technology for greater understanding of a rational scheme of the world. Educational practice should teach us how to learn by employing the ubiquitous interdisciplinary tool of the computer. True creativity lies in the management of knowledge, not in the production of given objects of art, or tomes of discourse.
Precursors of multimedia and hypertext have existed for centuries. Throughout the history of our culture, we have brought together creative energy in institutions, from the cathedral to the library, which represent our highest aspirations. The present strength of the computer is its ability to coalesce our energies in the quest for enlightenment; its speed, flexibility, and strength in retention of fact enhance what already has been embedded in the constant course of human intelligence- the desire to create new meaning though relationships.
We posit that the visionary designer, the creative interlocutor, is one who is both integrated and an integrator. This individual is learned in a manner so that his creativity functions as an organic part of society, and he or she acts to connect for the common good. The creative interlocutor is an integrator in his or her ability to negotiate the disparate fields of human knowledge, and bring them together in previously unimagined ways. In so doing, this person enables to further their creative potential.