The Milia tendency

Branko Djakovic and Jelena Rupnik lap up the atmosphere of MILIA 96 - the International Publishing and New Media Market in Cannes - and feel the shape of things to come.


Almost 9000 participants from 51 countries took part in the event, organized by Reed Midem Organisation. Almost all seemed surprised by the size and the impact of the show, best described by Jean Michael Jarre, president of this year's jury, as the "best kept little secret of the publishing world". Well. it is not going to be a secret any more.

The opening speech came from Nicholas Negroponte, director of MIT Media Laboratory and author of bestseller Being Digital. A fiery techno-evangelist, Mr. Negroponte warned that the world is ruled by "digitally homeless", who push the computer literate to the margin.
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He also warned that the financial potential of the Internet is not being used to the full. But many of the exhibitors did not seem to agree with him. Most of what they had to offer at the show were new and ingenious ways to sell their wares through offline and online projects.
Not surprisingly, all the major publishers were present on the show exhibiting products that ranged from an endless stream of reference and edutainement CDs to new Internet service provides. Bertelsman and America Online venture called Europe Online was one of the more visible projects around.
IBM came out with a sackfull of CDs most of which are pure entertainment titles but their most interesting one was the Virtual Musical adventure where the player strummed along with the likes of Aerosmith learning to play in a rock and roll band. This was made possible by the Virtual Pick and instrument that translated simple little scratches across any surface into complex chords that the computer aligned with music from the CD-ROM. This was the only game that every single visitor to the show tried out.
Parallel to the exhibition, the conference program tackled the most important issues of multimedia business on an international scale. Douglas Adams moderated a conference on emerging virtual communities. He is currently working on a web project called, surprisingly, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet and is disappointed by the lack of creativity in virtual worlds which are modelled closely on the existing world.
Other famous names could also be met at MILIA; Laurie Anderson, whose first CD-Rom Puppet Motel was recently published by the Voyager Company, was pessimistic about the future of the Internet, and appealed to all multimedia artists to join in the effort "to insure the Net remains more than a trade show". Which seems quite the opposite of what Negroponte was saying, really.
The well known French comic strip artist Jean Giraud (Moebius) appeared at the show to promote his new CD-Rom - The Arzach Adventure, published by Byron Press Multimedia. Finally, John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation summed up the events on MILIA in the closing speech.


This year's MILIA was a visible success and proved that the market has firmed up, offering a powerful incentive for a number of industries especially publishing, entertainment and art.