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

Afterimage, July-August, 2002 by David Goldberg

In general, authoring software introduces a layer of abstraction to computing, one that allows binary data to be choreographed at its highest conceptual level: that of "information" (image, sound, decision), instead of a programmer's stream or collection of bits. The resulting logical entity--call it, in generic terms, a presentation--is a vehicle for alternative computing experiences in much the same way that a costume functions in relation to the human body. When authors costume (and customize) the computer's GUI, they communicate information in terms of its, content, not in terms of the program that encoded it; an image experienced as part of a running Director movie is not the same when it is surrounded by the functional ornamentation of a program like Adobe Photoshop, or Director's own interface, or when it becomes a computer's desktop graphic. Authored content reads differently.

We frequently refer to this information-in-costume as "multimedia," a term that does not adequately describe an assemblage of concepts and techniques inspired by and borrowed from cinema, video games and interactive computing. The authoring tool's genealogical diversity is readily visible in Director, whose ancestry goes back to Apple's Hypercard, and includes rival cousins Flash and Authorware, living peers like SuperCard and Powerpoint, and a host of ghosts such as mTropolis, Apple Media Tool and Oracle Media Objects. The information organized by any of these authoring tools can be presented sequentially, randomly or simultaneously, all on one screen. In Macromedia Director, this choreography is recorded in the score, while its visible results appear on the stage.

In his 1937 essay "The Future of Music," avant-garde composer john Cage wrote that "the 'frame' or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time" as far as the composer of sound was concerned. Cage was already prepared to think in terms of music as cinematic apparatus composed via a system driven by external events and not prescriptions. Cage was prepared to accommodate accident within structure, and was not afraid of electronic instruments. If we switch the phrase "composer of sound" for "author of media" we find ourselves in some version of Cage's predicted frame-driven future. From megahertz to refresh rates, the computing environment is a choreography of events possessing the complexity and precision of a Balinese gamelan, operating at speeds that border on the unimaginable. Digital representations require the definition of discrete steps, and cannot avoid being reduced to absolute minutiae, like sprockets along the edge of film. The majority of time-based authoring tools use the metaphor of the frame, and are able to operate at increasingly flexible tempos that can take us from time-lapse to bullet-time. Director works with various time scales, including the visible frames in its score, logical "ticks" of its internal run-time clock, milliseconds of sound, network timeouts and frame-rates of digital video; Director can even demand more "frames" or cycles from the computer's processor.