Pioneers of the new audio-visual media Analysis/Commentary Like spores blown to the wind, yielding germ or left to dry and die in the sands and the rocks, technological ideas either spread widely or dry and die. For the most part, perhaps, they die, but those that eventually take root trace strange wanderings. For example, in the seventies and eighties, Xerox's Palo Alto laboratories yielded graphic discoveries that produced strange, distant germinations. The first desktop publishing systems were graphic displays invented by Palo Alto Research Center scientists. The Palo Alto center was a treasury that was pillaged by software entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft. Even Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web prototype mimics in many respects the file-interweaving displayed by early desktop publishing programs like Xerox's Ventura. (Desktop publishers were online editing tools for print publications.) Later these media migrated wholly to the computer screen, and through enhanced digital wizardry, learned to accommodate sound and motion. They eventually yielded DVD media -- strange fruit, blown high and wide, and yet redolent of the original Palo Alto efflorescence. DVD developers now call their art "authoring" -- but authoring was also what desktop publishers of pre-DVD times called their assemblages of media. The pre-DVD formats inspired the Web, while today's authors, equipped with fast computers to crunch large graphics, sounds, and motion, run complex software -- MPEG-2 encoders -- that compress these graphics and sound to a manageable size for distribution online or offline. While true digital authoring still awaits broadband, today there is DVD. DVD authors begin with "assets" -- pictures, sounds, text, animation, and imported media -- graphics taken from other forms of representation, such as 16mm film or VHS tape in digitized format. The task of making the initial material intelligible as art or science is called programming and flow charting. The DVD author, like a book author, creates an outline and a plot, identifies characters, and develops points of transition and climax. Once materials are sufficiently organized, associated with menu controls, and embedded in a configurable location in the format, the author begins encoding. Encoding is a software process that assigns a memory weight to material. The material can be layered in a very granular form for close-ups and highly-charged visual segments, or lightly weighted for highly redundant material -- a still scene, a slow-motion representation, a night scene, etc. DVD authoring software typically makes several passes at the same material, determining where material should be dense and where it should be thin. The completed encoding process produces a transitional disk that must be verified, and discarded if it has defects. If the test disk fails, the whole process must be repeated. If it proves valid, the DVD author creates a permanent master that serves as a basis for replication. This is the mass copying of an original disk -- production. The steps of authoring recall the procedures that go into making a movie, but they also emulate new forms of home production -- like web-weaving, using HTML, Windows file-authoring, or desktop publishing. The new digital media free the individual to compete with professionals and try processes that have been, until now, inaccessible to them. This final germination is an empowerment, a freedom to do and discover that may create one of the lasting achievements of our time. The Romans and Greeks left palaces and statues; the electronic experimenters of our own age may leave likenesses of themselves or their lifestyles to posterity that say more about human inner states than do effigies of cold stone. December 15, 1999