Welcome to the Future Interview: Bob Stein (Voyager)

Bob Stein founded The Voyager Company in 1985, an early pioneer of electronic books and interactive CD-ROMs. For 13 years, he led the development of over 300 titles in The Criterion Collection, a series of definitive films on videodisc, and more than 75 CD ROM titles including the CD Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, 'Who Built America', or I Photograph to remember. Previous to Voyager, Stein worked with Alan Kay in the Research Group at Atari on a variety of electronic publishing projects. In 2004, Bob Stein founded the Institute for the Future of the Book (www.futureofthebook.org), with the goal of finding new models for publishing as it moved from the page to the screen, from the enclosed world of the individual reader to the networked one of the Internet.

What was your very first experience with digital edition?

The very first thing we did with digital was when Apple put out something called Hypercard. Hypercard allowed you to control an analog videodisc (people think that laser discs were digital but they were not, they were analog), from the computer. I am not a geek, I felt physics for poets, but Hypercard was so easy to use that even somebody like me could. A friend had made a laser disc with all the photographs of works that are hung in the National Gallery in Washington, and I made a little hypercard program that search among them. For example, if you searched « impressionist landscape with boats », it will show you all the french impressionist landscapes that had boats in them. It was a silly little program. We showed it at Macworld, when Apple first released Hypercard in 1987. It was knowed as Wildcard when it was in beta.

The first thing that we published, was called Amanda Stories. It is a nice story : The man who wrote Hypercard Bill Atkinson went to a marriage councillor. And the marriage councillor was Bob Goodenough. He gave to him a copy of Wildcard, and Bob Goodenough it gave it to his wife Amanda. Amanda Goodenough made these little point and click stories, Amanda's stories, who were the very first interactive books.

Text and books seem to be fundamental in the Voyager productions. Why this interest in books? How did you go from books on floppy disk to CD-ROMs?

I had been a book publisher, I came out of the book world. The first thing we made were the laserdiscs. The label was Criterion and the logo, a book turning into a disc (1984). From the beginning, everything I have done has been an extension of the book. In the early 1992, I'd been hired by the Encyclopedia Britannica to think about their future. I wrestled for a long time with the question what is a book and how can we improve it by going electronic. I realised one day that if I stopped thinking about a book in terms of its physical nature, but start thinking about the way it is used, the book was a medium where the user was in complete control of the experience. You could re-read a paragraph twenty times, you could flip back and forth very easily. Books were what we call now random access devices. At that time, television movies were all « producer driven » : you sat in a chair and the movie went for two hours, and you could not control it. What I realised is that they put microprocessors into everything and that eventually, all these « producer driven » media of the XX century will be transformed into « user-driven » media, like books were. So I began to think that distinction was not book versus movie, but between something that is being broadcast or published, for individual access.

We started with analog video on the movies, and then we went to CD-rom in the late eighties. It wasn't that I was particulary interested in movies. In 1980, I started to read about the developments in what was called then the Architecture Machine Group at MIT, and became the Media Lab. They were doing all those amazing things mainly with videodiscs, controlled by computers. And when I saw these things I realized that everything was going to change. I was interested in how these forms of expression are going to change with the advent of interactive media. We started with the videodiscs because they were ready to go. CD-rom did not exist yet. So the place to start was with movies.

When we published the first films, they included hundred of pages of still pictures, and commentary tracks. You accessed the film the way you did a book. The user could stop the picture whenever he wanted, could go back and forth. So people started reading movies they way they read books. For me those were the first interactive books I was involved with.

As things became possible, we did it. When Apple gave us Hypercard, we did something. The first day that Apple send me a CD-rom drive to hook up to my macintosh, I took it to Robert Winter, music professor at UCLA, and we cobbled together the demo of the Beethoven program (in 1989)

When Apple send me a few year later a prototype of the first powerbook, I had a friend visiting from Austria, who worked at the National Library. He whisked it out of my hands. And came back ten minutes later and put the first ten pages of Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky into a hypercard stack. And we looked at it and we said oh, we can now do electronic books. This was a small device, just a little bit bigger than an iPad. And we suddenly realised that electronic book were now possible. I always had a vision of were I was going, and always had to wait for the infrastructure to catch up. Each time a new feature became available, we explored how to use it.

And so you started in 1992 the first e-books on 1,4 MB floppy discs, the Expanded Books series?

Yes, here you can somebody making a demo of those first interactive books, Neuromancer by Gibson. What is interesting in this demo, this is 1982, and we are still ahead of where they are now.

Basically all we were trying to do at that time, was trying to reproduce the cleverness of a book page. The programmers who worked on it would have put all kinds of buttons on the pages, and I insisted that the electronic books had to be as clean as print books, there could be absolutely no buttons visible if you were just reading. We figured out how to do how to do that, similarly of what Apple and Amazon are doing now. These were not tablets at the time but computer with mice. You should not lose any functionality of the book, you should only add. You could write in the margins of our electronic books, you could highlight, you could put a paperclip on a page. If you click on a word, you could search for it in the book. The search engine was basically the main addition. For some of us this made a huge difference.

And also for the people of my era, who were raised believing you should never deface a book, be able to write in the book without defacing it, psychologically made a huge difference. One other important think about those e-books is the kinetic aspect. When I would give a demonstration, I would lie down on the stage and I would prop the powerbook against my knees, and say the people, when you are in bed and read a heavy book you need two hands to hold the book and one to turn pages. I would show how I could turn the pages with only one finger.

Why did you choose to provide the beginner with thoose tools?

When we showed the National Gallery videodisc with the little hypercard stack, teacher would call us : « we love what you're doing, controlling disc from the macintosh, can you help us » ? We built a little tool and made it available to anybody else. And when we made the Beethoven cd-rom, people told us the same thing, then we made the audio stack for teachers and when we made the first e-book, we made it available also.

My interest was always in exploring new issues. If we make tools available, other people will explore how to use them and collectively we would invent the future. I would not be richer, but the future will be richer if more of us were involved.

When the CD-rom came out, did you consider it as a new storage ou a new media? Was there something like "cd-rom art"?

Of course, with the advent of cd-rom, there was more storage that allowed the inclusion for more media. Our first release was the cd Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by Robert Winter (1989). You know the story: the size of a audio compact disc was set by Norio Ogha, the head of Sony, who told his engineers that they had to make the capacity of the CD able to contain the entirety of the London Philarmonic Orchestra's recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on one disc. We knew that more storage will enable different kinds of programs. When they put the cd-rom out, we did not have color computer, and we did not have movies yet. it was before Quicktime, and before color. We could just put more pictures and more sounds.

Previous to Voyager, I worked with the great computer scientist, father of the personal computer, Alan Kay in the Research Group at Atari. Alan Kay loved to talk about music, I loved music but I don't understand how to talk about it. I decided to take a music appreciation class at UCLA and the professor was a phenomenal professor, Robert Winter. He got 500 hundreds adults to pay 20 euros a class back in 1982 to hear his lectures. He would take a particular piece, and gave a slide show explaining its historical and cultural context. He would play snippets from other works to show where it comes from. Then he would hire a quartet and they would play live the piece, he would keep stopping them every few mesures, to explain the piece. Then there would be a break, the quartet would come back on the stage and play it from beginning into the end. And you would understand more about it, with all that cultural context that has been added.

And the day that Apple send me a cd-rom, I went to Robert Winter's House to tell him, « you know we can reproduce your class now as a book ». And so we did. We just reproduce the experience of being on those class. All my works are about adding context, in a fundamental level, taking a work and expand it to include contextual information. Alan Kay, gave one of the best compliment ever. He said of the Beethoven that it was the first piece of interactive media that was good enough to criticize. It is the only piece I put my name on.

Voyager released many cd-roms. Which ones in your opinion were the most innovative?

To me, the most significant one were those I was personally involved in, like the art CD-rom I photograph to remember by Pedro Meyer, a well-known mexican photographer. I met him at a party at the home of the video artist Bill Viola (I had published a lot of Bill's single channel video works on laserdiscs and videotape). Pedro Meyer invited me at his home and showed me these photographs he had taken during the last three years of his parents life. It was a beautiful story. I realised when he was telling this to me that with cd-rom and computers, we had the ability to publish a narrative slide show. He was showing me pictures and telling me a story. So we did it. In 1990, I was invited at the Seybold Digital World Conference in Beverly Hills, attended by 500 hundred men all in suited from the computer world. I used my time to show I photograph to Remember when it was still in production. It was the first time that anybody anywhere had seen a computer used to express emotional ideas. For thirty minutes you could have heard a pindrop, nobody made a sound, it really changed everything. Up to that moment, computer were used for spreadsheets and now they were being used to express emotion.

Voyager also produced Laurie Anderson's famous Puppet Motel or The Resident's Freakshow?

Concerning the artists cd-roms, I was delighted to do them, but I was not involved with them. Laurie Anderson wanted to make a cd-rom (it was a joined production with Gallimard ; Pierre Marchand, the head of Gallimard Jeunesse, was my closest camarade, we really both were in love with what could happen), and so did The Residents. The Art Spiegelman's Maus was my idea, but creatively there was not a lot to do, and it did not anything we had not done before. The things I am attached to emotionally are the ones where we are doing things for the very first time and I was intimately involved in the conceptually design.

I appreciate the artist's works, but let's take those two works by the Laurie Anderson (1995) and The Residents (1994). They were fine but they were so primitive in what they could do. For me, what I saw was artists stretching themselves to work with a new medium. But I would argue that this medium was not ready yet to create great art with. I know that a lot of people who saw the Residents piece or the Puppet Motel were blown away. For them, it was a whole new world of possibilities. That was because they had not seen all the things we had done before that.

To me, the value of those pieces was saying to artists to all over the world, there is a new medium coming, pay attention to it, without being itself important art. With Blam! (by Necro Enema Amalgamated, ed.), what you have is unknown artists doing something that itself is important to look at. Blam! as a work of art was to me much more important than Puppet Motel or The Residents. It has vitality that would still look good today.

How do you analyse afterwards the "failure" of the medium?

These are nine scenarios I did in 1982: the drawings showed how we thought people will be using the encyclopedia of the future. On one of those drawings, you see a mother with her children. The device she has in her hand has an antenna, so it's wireless and she is asking the encyclopedia questions about what she is seing. And what is interesting if you look at all the nine drawings, basically, in all of them, its individuals are getting information out of an archive. What the drawings do not show is people interacting with each other, and it turns out that the most important thing about the internet was not that you can get information from it but that it put people in touch with each other in the context of this information. So when the internet, when the web came along, it put people together and it was much more compelling and much more powerful than just another form of the book. There is no chance of cd-roms to continue, especially when you think how expensive they were, eveything on the internet is free, cd-roms were costing 30, 40 dollars.

We are just now coming into an era were people start to design interactive book on the internet. The kind of characteristics we had on the cd-rom are very very slowly coming to the internet. When they'll come, they will come with their social component. If I think of my own work, expanding the notion of the page to include audio and video, the second half is extending the notion of the page to include the readers, being actively engaged with each other in the margin. These two strands are weaving together, we will see in the next ten years, interactive programs like we made on cd-rom but with a strong social component. The other big difference would be that instead each cd-rom being an island onto itself, everything would be linked.

People should be able to be inside the book and if an idea should occur to one of us, I should be able to send you an example of what I am thinking about. When the Charlie Hebdo event happened, there was a huge amount of debate of what this is representing. Imagine that you and I are reading an essay together and in the margin, we are expressing our ideas, adding link to other examples to make our point.

In the print era, somebody writes something and it gets incoded into this object, the conversation that this object engenders in society is not part of the book, it is outside the book, but in the futur the conversation will be part of the book. It is not just what the author did, it is now what the readers are adding to it in the margins. It could be a movie to. You could talk in the margin of a movie to, put a comment on a precise time code. It is called social Book. It is collaborative thinking.

Do you think it is important to preserve those early « born digital contents »? And if so, under what form?

Preservation is important but the form, as you suggest is crucial. There are a number of elements involved in preservation, the bits themselves, the machines that the bits ran on, emulators which can run the bits, instructions on how to "use" the bits. A record of what the bits "looked" like when being used; that is a record of the user's experience. The ideal is to be able to run the bits on the original target machines -- but that will be unlikely, except in unusual cases. Running the programs on emulators is good but will take a lot of work to keep the emulators up to date and as well as the necessary set of instructions. Most importantly, it would be good to create a video record of users using the early programs.

Some video demos of Voyager Compagny cd-roms:

The complete Maus
https://vimeo.com/album/1505580/video/18535852

Who built America, published by The Voyager Compagny in 1993
https://vimeo.com/110753458

The CD companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by Robert Winter
https://vimeo.com/18571933

I photograph to remember
https://www.facebook.com/zonezerophoto/posts/285318838179417
http://www.pedromeyer.com/galleries/i-photograph/

The CD-ROM is long gone as platform of distribution, but digital storytelling has found new ecosystems to migrate to. So, I Photograph to Remember now lives on our site, and is also available as a free podcast that you can download to your iPad or iPhone.

Interview by Marie Lechner, journalist specialised in digital cultures, and researcher at Pamal (Preservation-Archeology-Media art Lab) at the École Supérieure d'Art in Avignon (pamal.org)