My dreams continue of an epic long blog post story of my journeys through digital storytelling, yet every thread ends up being a tangent worth chasing worthy of its own post. Yesterday it was the CoolIris gizmo I resurrected for 50 Web Ways to Tell a Story and today it was a pivotal conference I was sent to in 1996.
At the time I was still relatively new in my role as an instructional technologist at the district office of the Maricopa Community Colleges in the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (MCLI is still around, that’s the current web site, the one I built is somewhat archived). I jumped into the web in 1993, making the Writing HTML tutorial. I’d gotten deep into building projects with faculty in Hypercard, then branched more into Macromedia Director (DirectorWeb went up in 1994 before Macromedia had a web site) doing CD-ROM projects eventually a few DVD one. I organized projects where faculty reviewed software and was part of the MCLI in supporting the district wide instructional technology agenda setting with a thing known as Ocotillo.
Even with all that I left off a lot. Or forgot.
But a pivotal moment of huge importance happened in 1996 when the MCLI’s Director, the one who hired me in 1992 and was such a mentor steeped in instructional design, suggested I learn about something called digital storytelling. She offered to send me to a conference in 1996 to learn more. Oh, and by the way…. the conference was in Hawaii.
The best thing about this is that her name was Story– Dr. Naomi Okamura Story. And she pretty much set in motion everything that happened in my career.
What I Do Remember…
… seems little. The idea of the conference was to bring together people from the film and tv industry where the story was central to making “hits” along with people from education, a few of whom were thinking about the basic precepts of story and how theory might apply to education.
What I had is that featured image of my conference badge I kept in my Maricopa office for a long time, and at least the name of the conference: “Storytelling for the New Millennium.”
I was fuzzy as to the location (beyond Hawaii) and for some reason I had in mind it was on Oahu (wrong). I recalled it was relatively small, but the one thing that stood clearly out was a performance by a digital storyteller named Dana Atchley.
Surprisingly, Dana has no article in Wikipedia, and a scant reference in the one for Digital Storytelling. I won’t attempt to tell it all. I recommend the tribute by Fred Harden as A story about Dana Atchley “a digital story, therefore vulnerable to magnets” which states it was written ironically in 1996. Dana paired up with Joe Lambert (who I have been lucky to know a long time and heard many of his stories) to start the Center for Digital Storytelling (still going strong).
At this conference, Dana did his digital storytelling on stage the show he was doing as Next Exit nextexit.com (web dead, but from the Internet Archive see 1996 snapshot and one from 2012). This is not my photo, but one I snagged somehwere and used in presentations as a reference.
Dana sat on a stump, and off to the side was a TV monitor playing a looping video of a campfire. Projected on screen in the back was some kind of multimedia interactive display, operated by an assistant back stage (I do remember that it was built in Macromedia Director). Dana would interact with the audience, and he would choose media to display from the icons on the bottom, photos, videos, music to accompany the stories he would tell.
I found a bit of his storytelling on the YouTube
This is not modern “presenting”.
I was mesmerized and inspired.
That’s about all I recall from the conference. I have a vague memory I chatted with Dana during a break, but I bet it was more of a fan boy babbling thanks moment.
I decided to see what info I might find about the 1996 Storytelling for the New Millennium conference.
What I Found…
Once again I read all the time about how broken search is, but in seconds of searching for the conference name, I landed on “New Millennium Telling” A Report on the 1996 Storytelling for the New Millennium Conference by Eric Miller. I note with a wink that this sits in a tilde directory at the University of Pennsylvania. It says “Originally published in Storytelling Magazine, July 1996″ I looked briefly for a web source, but mostly found mentions of this magazine.
No worries as the full text is sitting here in Eric’s web space, maybe lingering there since 1996. And the facts:
Over 400 people attended the Storytelling for the New Millennium Conference held April 25-27, 1996, in Kauai, Hawaii, for a look at the new media, which include multimedia, virtual reality, digital, interactive, and telecommunicational technologies.
Organized by the American Film Institute and the fledgling Kauai Institute for Communications Media, the event brought together leaders from the American film and computer industries, as well as representatives from the fields of telecommunications, publishing, comedy, rock music, academic, and education.
https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~emiller/Kauai_article.html
Right away it clarifies the conference was on Kauai, the extact dates, but also that it was over 400 people, so medium sized for a conference. Also forgotten by me were a keynote by Peter Bergman, co-founder of Firesign Theatre and a pre-conference worksop by Martin Behrens, on new media’s use of interactive narrative mentioing the early perfomance web act “The Spot“
Dana Atchley apparently gave a three day workshop in the Center for Digital Storytelling method, with participants editing in Adobe Premiere. His Next Exit session that I did remember above is described:
Dana Atchley demonstrated the genre of digital storytelling by giving a performance of “Next Exit,” his life story. On stage, Mr. Atchley was accompanied by a large screen on which there were folders labeled “the ’40s,” “the ’50s,” “the ’60s,” and so on. Using a wireless mouse, he opened the folders and dragged out files of movie clips, placing them along a time-line at the bottom of the screen. While telling the story, Mr. Atchley periodically clicked open the files, each of which showed a brief episode from his life. This definitely was a storytelling performance–it would have been as stirring without the electronic images and sounds.
A presentation is mentioned that now rings a bit of a memory bell from musician Graham Nash who “showed video documentation of his new stage show, LifeSighs, in which he accompanies himself with advanced computer graphics on a large screen, including a speaking mask that is generated live by technicians and an actor in Mr. Nash’s Los Angeles studio.” Apparently at the end of his talk, Nash video called David Crosby who was in California for more conversations.
In line with the importance most on stage storytellers say about connecting with the audience:
In an interview, speaking of the future, Mr. Nash expressed interest in developing input devices (such as video cameras and sensitive chairs for measuring body movements, blood pressure, etc.) that would enable the storyteller to receive unconscious as well as conscious feedback from listeners, be they at the performance or attending via telephone lines.
https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~emiller/Kauai_article.html
Wild, eh? Also it says that Nash closed the conference with a concert. I guess I was there.
And I note as well that the article mentions that musician Todd Rundgren made some remarks about audience participation. I do recall that in some of Rungren’s interactive media work, he too was a user of Macromedia Director. I am partly sure I remember he was a little active on the Direct-L listserv, and I kid myself that I might have answered a question for him there (that is a highly suspect memory).
Eric Miller covered much more of the conference than my memory! And navigating up to his home page for this article it looks as though he was at University of Pennsylvania as a PhD candidate in Folklore, at least through 2008 which looks like the last update.
But here’s where it gets interesting, his page indicates he founded in 2007 the World Storytelling Institute which still exists and is very active, based in south east india region of Chennai. Wow. Much more to look at there.
Scratch Some More and I Find Conference Media
Eric’s article mentions the organization that sponsored the 1996 Storytelling for a New Millennium conference, the Kauai Institute for Communications Media or http://www.filmkauai.com/kicm/ a link no longer in service, but well preserved in the Internet Archive, and it is one more step and I land on the original web page for the conference.
The archived site links to a “promotional video” linking to a Quicktime movie weighing a whopping 1.5Mb and at a mega resolution of 120x90px. I was actually able to download the file from the Internet Archive, but the video failed to open in QuickTime player with an error “This file contains some media which isn’t compatible with QuickTime Player.”
I am not done! I pop open my copy of the Handbrake video converter (open source) which was able to convert it to a modern mp4- check out the promo!
But even better, I found there too the conference brochure, and I can see the full list of workshops, presenters (noting Thomas Dolby was there and maybe I remember that).
The End of the Story?
There is no real ending, just my joy of being able to weave together with not too much effort (and the gold that is the Internet Archive) this experience that I had but did not register much in memory. Or maybe it is embedded more deeply, the interest this generated in my when I got back to Maricopa.
A storytelling approach wove its way into all my later work, my faculty and web projects at Maricopa, this blog, the stories in my photos, the 50 Ways stuff, a whole raft of storytelling presentations/workshops (oh yes the key chain stories), Five Card Flickr Stories, and of course the explosion of ds106, and more (that will be in that upcoming mega blog post).
It just surfaced today was I got an email from the work that Joe Lambert still carries on via his work at Storyhost.
All of this spawned by my guide I was so fortunate to have at Maricopa, thanks for the Story in my life, Naomi Story.
Featured Image: Conference Boondoggle flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
