EnterFrame: Cage, Deleuze and Macromedia Director - multimedia authoring software - Evaluation

Afterimage, July-August, 2002 by David Goldberg

on prepareMovie

To think about Macromedia Director is to think about a complex and powerful piece of software in the category of "multimedia" authoring. To think critically or theoretically about Director is to think about a philosophical framework and not just a production tool. By surveying the key features of its interface and capabilities with a little help from John Cage and Gilles Deleuze, this article contemplates how Macromedia Director--a digital media authoring veteran at 17 years old--remains an incredibly rich, open "site" for investigating the benefits, problems and complexities of the "new media experience."

Originally designed in the mid-1980s to facilitate video game authoring (as Videoworks I & II), Director is currently at version 8.5, and includes 3D modelling, pixel-level control of graphics, an object-oriented scripting environment, and streaming media protocols in its feature set. It came of age in the early 1990s when the CD-ROM represented the synergistic effects of microprocessor improvements applied to the management of graphics and sound. This storage medium's message was one of Director announcing that access to a computer's audio, visual and interface resources was no longer the exclusive right of professional programmers. Reflecting this ongoing process of democratization, Director enjoys strong support from a developer community that extends the program's capabilities through "Xtras." With extended features such as database management, DVD playback and control of the computer's operating system, Director is approaching the status of a full-fledged application development environment. These third- party enhancements supplement Director's primary tenets: emphasis on artistic as well as commercial applications; continued commitment to its cinema-based production and organizational metaphors; supporting Internet-related media formats; and steady evolution of its scripting language.

Beyond animation, slideshows and point-and-click interfaces, Director can be used to create custom Internet browsers, streaming media clients, music sequencers, peer-to-peer applications, and video games that are at least as sophisticated as those from the "classic" 16-bit era. Though some of these possibilities require supplementary technologies and a certain degree of programming effort, Director is for the most part "template free." Its founding (possibly vestigial) metaphor remains "movie-making." Speaking of casts, scores and stages implies the crafting of narrative, which is more than a functional arrangement of different media types, or the delivery of content through the most popular channels. It is not just a long history with the program (since It was Videoworks) in educational, artistic and commercial contexts, or a chance to apply postmodern philosophy, that makes me conceive of Director as more than a media processor. To re-think and remember Director now that the Web is the new CD-ROM is to appr ehend a tool that has quietly integrated itself into the fabrics of networked media and data processing that surround us. Though the "new media experience" is heavily scripted and monitored, Director offers the opportunity to create alternative and critical responses to this experience on its own terms--but not without serious theoretical considerations that must replace the lingering hype of the "desktop multimedia revolution."

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Authoring tools are implemented based on one of four organizational approaches that reflect how the author or user is expected to conceive or experience the resulting package of media. They are the slide show, the stack of cards, the circuit-design model and the timeline model. All four approaches bear traces of real-world practices that have imparted some of their aura. The authored slide show (Powerpoint) is widely used (and abused) in corporate America, bureaucratic organizations and scientific communities. The card stack (Hypercard, Supercard) is probably the most venerable approach, having turned its metaphorical connections to epistemology, experimental publishing and the encyclopedia into a concrete function: the hyperlink. The circuit-based model (Authorware, mTropolis) emerged as an alternative to the established timeline model, and came from a decidedly more technical background in computer-assisted design tools. In circuit-based authoring one "wires together" various iconic media assets, events or actions, resulting in a flowchart that represents the overall logic of the project. A timeline-based tool (Director, Flash) employs the more intuitive "tracks over time" approach; Director gathers all of its interface conventions and production approaches under the umbrella metaphor of making movies.

Director recasts the information-processing computer as a movie-making machine, or a signification engine bolstered by interactivity that can be mechanically scripted with finite options or driven by the fluid dynamics of video game methodologies. But when one introduces the program to the cinematic philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the compositional approaches of John Cage it can become something else entirely. When interactive media is introduced to Deleuze's radical theories of cinema-thought and Cageian silence--which can be understood as the dynamics of a system that is left to "be itself"--a sort of "idle" artificial awareness becomes possible. But before exploring this Cage-Deleuze hybridity, we must first get a handle on what authoring software actually does.