From Wood to Bits
Television is turning the children of America into brainwashed zombies!
The latest lecture from some thundering moralist of the left or right? Hardly. You'll find this battlecry not far beneath the Day-glo facade of Rodney Alan Greenblat's Dazzeloids -- a cockeyed call to arms against "medioocrity and boredom" in the clever disguise of a children's CD-ROM.
Greenblat, a New York-based artist and sculptor who first made the jump to multimedia with his 1992 Rodney's Wonder Window, so artfully straddles the border between kiddie-product naivete and underground-camp irony that even he can't figure out where his work belongs.
Dazzeloids' quartet of boredom-battling superheroes includes a "super-strong weight-lifting hulk who loves to read and write beautiful poetry" named Titan Rose; Stinkabod Lamé, an incontinent sheep who likes to slam-dance and bungee jump; and a four-armed, Scottish-accented electronics whiz named Yendor Talbneerg (try it backwards). Their leader is exiled princess Anne Dilly Whim, a horned crusader in Victorian finery. Their adversary is the BLANDO Corporation and its mogul -- the Mediogre, a green worm in a double-breasted blazer.
In a manifesto published at Greenblat's Dazzeloids Web site, Anne Dilly Whim declares:
"Dazzeloids believe freedom and technology can make the difference for us, but it must be in the hands of creatives and children. Pacifiers are not allowed. Entertainment should be sublime. Fun should be a vocation not a vacation. Dazzeloids eat the eye candy and slurp the ear soup. GOOSE THE TECHNOLOGY. BE YOUR OWN FOLLOWER. ROLL OVER AND PLAY GENIUS. COMPLETE A SUPER-MISSION."Dazzeloids eagerly lampoons the conventions of multimedia: its startup screen announces a "Complicated Initialization Procedure" with activities like "Fleecing RAM Sheep." But Greenblat still finds room in the new digital media for the kind of creative individualism that the BLANDOs of the world long ago expunged from broadcast-land.A one-man multimedia band with a sandy shock of hair, narrow shoulders and an elfin face, Greenblat talked to us at the recent Macromedia Developers' Conference in San Francisco.
When people look at Dazzeloids they get a full measure of your sensibility. That sort of character is often missing from CD-ROMs.They're missing the personality of the creator. And that is an abstract thing -- you can't write in a marketing proposal, "CONTAINS ARTIST'S PERSONALITY!" But it's crucially important.
I've just finished reading a book about Walt Disney, and in a way that's what he did. After a while he didn't do any of the drawings or even think up the ideas. But he did manage somehow to inject his vision into everything. And it went on even after he died.
I think viewers, players, users, whatever you want to call them, are interested in people, in personality. Maybe a hardcore gamer doesn't care about that -- he wants action. But if you're talking about a general audience, they want a teacher, they want a comedian, they want an entertainer. When you don't have that, you're missing a lot.
Next page: The future of storytelling in a nonlinear age
