In the overture of the book, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, 2001, the authors presented that multimedia experience dates way back, to as early as 15000 BCE of the cave paintings of Lascaux. And the theory of multimedia has been established in 1849 by Wagner as “Gesamtkunstwerk”, or “Total Artwork”.
My initial encounter with the word “multimedia” is in the 90s during my primary school years in China. There was a special venue where English listening class are taught, called “Multimedia Classroom”. In this room, there are screens for video projection and every student are given headsets to listen to English recordings at their own pace. There are the visual, sound, and even interactive component in this initial encounter I had with multimedia, which to certain extent in turn also defined multimedia in my mind as means dealing with technological media.
The concept of Wagner’s artistic synthesis theory has really broadened my understanding to consider this art genre from a much pluralistic and unbiased point of view. I then start to notice many art experiences that qualify as multimedia but I have overlooked at. For example, the Japanese tea ceremony which values the overall experience of preparing and appreciating green tea, and Yuefu, a term for the music and dance ensemble that presents poems and folk songs in the Han Dynasty in China. These unification of more than one genre of works of art and engaging multi-sensory experience coincide perfectly with Wagner’s theory.
The recent decades have seen more interdisciplinary collaborations, especially artists seeking help from engineers to realise their work. The projects done by E.A.T in the past 40 years provide many great examples. Another phenomenon is the establishment of many artist collectives that consists of members from all disciplines, like the many engineers, designers and artists for collectives like Dumb Type in the 70s, and today’s Art+Com, Random International, teamLab etc.
I believe the future of multimedia is going to focus more on human beings as a subject matter. Here are two interesting works by Random International and teamLab. Enjoy!