December 2, 1990

HOW DO ideas become reality? A futurist says, “Someday we’ll be able to do X.” The world rolls its eyes at the absurdity, while a wily engineer or scientist hunkers down and does it. A marketeer then force-feeds it back to the eye-rollers, who then embrace it and can’t imagine having lived without it.

Admittedly simplistic, this model has been true for most ubiquitous technology today — from TV to CD to VCR.
But today there are thousands of talented people, a vast number of them centered in the San Francisco Bay Area, who are finding this paradigm has reached its zenith. They are producers of interactive media, or multimedia — a group of technologies that allows digital or analog video, sound and graphics to be incorporated into rich computing applications as different from databases or spreadsheets as garlic powder from a juicy clove. It transforms a PC into a powerful tool for personal communication and education.

But these folks have some problems. One is that San Francisco doesn’t respect or support its artists — much like that old Woody Allen schtick, it doesn’t seem to want to belong to a club that would have it as a member.

But what may be even worse, they can’t find each other. It takes a lot of talent to pull a multimedia production together: programmers, sound specialists, art directors, video producers, graphic designers, interactivity gurus. In a world where cheap electronics and computing power have started to make obsolete the studio backlot, sound stage and post-production house, people who might otherwise run into each other on the job are all hacking away at their private little home production studios.

Getting them together is a thorny problem, and one that multimedia producers Mikkel Aaland, photographer, and Michael Rogers, senior editor for Newsweek, decided required some direct action.

So on Wednesday they pulled together a diverse group of people to, in Aaland’s words, “kick-start” a multimedia industry in San Francisco. (Their timing was ironically good: software giant Microsoft opened the doors to its first-ever, sold-out conference for multimedia developers that same day. Unfortunately, the doors opened at the San Jose Fairmont, not the one in San Francisco.)

Attendees ranged from Angela Alioto of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to Tim Mott and Trip Hawkins, presidents of San Francisco-based MacroMind and San Mateo-based Electronic Arts, both eminences grises of interactive software design. The legendary Kristina Hooper, director of Apple Computer’s Multimedia Lab, was there, as was Marc Kasky, director of Fort Mason Center, and Wendy Garfield of the Center for Electronic Art. Many producers, including Rob Fulop of Interactive Productions and Michael Naimark, attended. It was an august group, and one that knew what it was talking about.

But no one really had the answer for how to get the Bay Area’s multimedia producers the respect (contracts, dollars) they deserve. Hooper, a native San Franciscan and veteran of the renowned MIT Media Lab, says she had to come home to San Francisco to find good video and graphic artists because here, artists are willing to try something new. What a great compliment. Why doesn’t San Francisco celebrate that? Japan, Inc. has caught on, believe me — it sends emissaries to San Francisco all the time, in search of software talent to exploit its hardware. It’s even in the process of setting up its own “media lab” here.

Of course, Wednesday’s diversity of people didn’t really create an atmosphere for an “action agenda,” or anything like that. But all did agree that multimedia producers need a place to show their work (maybe at Fort Mason), a place to “network” and contact each other, and some resources that can keep the multimedia production industry — bound for glory, I predict — here in the Bay Area. I don’t know that it was much more than a kick-start, but for sure it didn’t stall. And maybe I’ll even host the next get together myself.