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May 5, 1997 I wanted the closing credits to be a whiz-bang multimedia extravaganza, a fitting tribute to all of the people who helped contribute to the making of the book A World's Fair for the Global Village, the audio CD Concert in the Park, and this CD-ROM, A Unique Assemblage. But, our battle lines were stretched thin, and dreams of a final sequence triggered by onWindowOut that would play a VRML world with interior Quicktime movies with morphing expressive text and video, audio, and image snippets assembled from our 25 gigabyte archive of fair material never materialized. Fixing the 54 minutes of music on the audio CD, the 13,000 files on this disc (down from 40,000 just weeks before), and a book that ended up containing 800 hi-resolution images on 3 gigabytes of Jazz drives kept us all as flat out as a lizard drinking. Instead, you get a letter from me. In a way, ASCII text is a fitting way to end this project, the same way it began. With a few email messages, some rudimentary html files, word went out on the Internet that a world's fair would be happening in 1996. The email morphed into several terabytes of disk on computers in 12 countries. The html files morphed into a fat pipe stretching from southeast Asia, across of all Japan, and into the very center of the Internet in Washington, D.C. Like the fair, this book started as ASCII text. At the final ceremony, I decided that a book would be a nice way to reach closure on two years of my life. For some reason, the MIT Press agreed with the proposal for a full-color coffeetable book with an audio disc and (at the time) three additional CD-ROMs. We even toyed with the idea of including a digital videodisc with all 11 gigabytes of Central Park. Projects have a funny way of evolving and you are now staring at the end result. On the Internet, with our fair, and even with this book, you never know what the final project is going to look like until construction is completed. Sometimes, even often, we were as surprised by the final product as our visitors. The look of this entire project, and indeed of the world's fair is the result of the design genius of Becky Pranger of Enviromedia. In addition to this project, Becky has done a half-dozen other sites that have been officially deemed highly cool by the people who certify these things on the net. Becky, along with her partner Larry Pranger, toiled long and hard on the book and the cd-rom. If you see something that looks good, they are the reason. The amount of work that goes into producing images that look as good at 100 megabytes as they do at 50k is truly astonishing, and it was not unusual for Becky and Larry to work around-the-clock for days on end to meet the fast-track production schedules. If you hear something that sounds good, then you want to look to Marty Lucas and Corinne Becknell of Becknell and Lucas Media. Marty and Corinne worked on Internet Multicasting Service projects for four years, and they are real pioneers in audio, the invisible medium of multimedia. They wrote all the original music on the audio CD, wrote even more original music for the CD-ROM, and fixed a huge number of broken audio files from other sites. You'll also see a wealth of other material from them on this disc, from the Molas Screen Saver to the Durga Puja movie. A cast of other players helped make this book, but two in particular deserve particular mention. Brad Burdick was chief engineer of the Internet Multicasting Service since shortly after we opened. Often working by himself (or with me helping, which is not always a positive effect), Brad provided all systems support for a highly chaotic network of computers that lay under the Internet Multicasting Service. He was Santa Claus, the face of the SEC, a telephone company control center, and a one-man operating staff for a radio station. Quite a few other people came and worked at various times for the Internet Multicasting Service. Like Brad Burdick, you can see their work throughout this project. Philippe Tabaux spent two years with us, building dozens of collections of web pages. Luther Brown left his promising career as a Washington insider and guided us through such arcane fields as getting Congressional press credentials. Stephanie Faul was the producer for HarperAudio and has edited every one of my books. This project also had a large number of contributors from the MIT Media Lab. Phillip Tsiongson wrote the Macintosh installation routine and programmed the amazing Java Overdrive option in just two days. It may be slow, but it sure is pretty, isn't it? Natasha Tsakarov did the video editing, and the work of Deb K. Roy can be seen everywhere, from the Congressional Memory Project to hours of audio footage and miles of stunning photographs. You wouldn't be looking at this disc if I hadn't been working at the MIT Media Lab, and it is Glorianna Davenport and her students in particular who provided the facilities and support to make that possible. A project like a world's fair is never possible without a sense of community, and the community that came together for this exposition truly spanned the globe. You can see on this disc material from all over, in particular IBM's Small Planet Pavilion, Message in a Bottle, Stavanger, RandyLand, the World of Kimchi, the Flowers of Holland, and many other sites that we included to give you a flavor for what the world's fair was like. It was a pleasure to work with so many people who have done such high-quality work. Many other people contributed to this project. The book contains a more detailed list, but even that list is will be guilty of overlooking many who worked long and hard. I suspect that for all of us who participated in the Internet 1996 World Exposition, the real thank you is not a list of names on a piece of glass or plastic. It is to be able to look at this invisible world exposition, this fair in the air, and to be able to remember what the fairgrounds looked like when they were just ASCII and html.
Carl Malamud |