Defining a New Medium

In his lecture, Steven Johnson, editor-in-chief and co-founder of the widely-praised Internet magazine Feed and writer of Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, will look at rising arts and compare them with the emergence of film. Are interface designers the equivalent of the Lumière Brothers? And who will make the first Citizen Kane of interface art and, more important, what will the creation look like? Janet Murray will talk about the development of the computer-based story: from electronic games and hypertext to interactive television and futuristic fantasies such as Star Trek's Holodeck. These developments can be understood from the invention of the film camera, more than one hundred years ago. Film started with animation and developed to 'features', a moment that people in multimedia have now also reached. What is the next step? Janet Murray, a pioneer of the new media, is a scientist working with MIT's Center for Educational Computing.