INTERVIEW:
Question 1
You came to Mediatech from San Francisco, your home town,. Can you tell us how your
adventure on the Internet started?
Answer
Well, I’ve been working on the Internet for about eight years now. I started working
on interfaces to the Internet because the Internet was very hard for people to use and I
realised that the reason the interfaces were so hard to use was because they weren’t
really centred around how people thought. They were very abstract. You had to remember
commands, you had to type the commands, if you didn’t get the commands just right,
you’d have to type them again. And so what I wanted to do was create interfaces that
would be intuitive so that people would immediately know from what was being presented
what they should do next. I mean, if you made an interface that made the Internet look
like your living room, you know how to use your living room. So I figured if I could bring
that kind of interface to the Internet, the barrier would lower. You wouldn’t need a
Ph.D. to use the Internet; a child or an older person or simply someone who is afraid of
computers could still use the Internet as a resource.
Question 2
How was VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) born?
Answer
VRML was born at the end of 1993. I was surfing - actually not even surfing the Internet,
before you surfed the Internet - I started to see this thing called the URL or the
Universal Resource Location pop up in my e-mail messages. I found that if I got a
programme called NCSA Mosaic, I would be able to use these URLs to go to places on the
Internet. This was before anyone called it the Web. And I downed software that made my
computer a Web browser and I also downed software that made my computer a Web server. My
computer became Web server number 330 on the Internet simply because it was a very early
time. And that week, I spent every night when I got home from work surfing the entire Web.
It’s inconceivable today, but then the Web was very small. Now from my own research
in virtual reality, I started to understand that while the Web was a very nice thing, it
was very easy to get lost in. The reason it was easy to get lost in was because on the Web
you click, you go to the next place, you click, you go to the next place etc.. Well, all
of a sudden you’ve clicked yourself into a place you don’t know you came from,
you don’t know how you got there, you don’t know where you are. You know
you’re here, but you don’t know where "here" is. And that is because
there’s no sense of place inside the Web. So I figured that if I could put my own
work inside a virtual reality, which was to give a sense of place to the Internet, and
combine with the work that had already been done on the Web, I would be able to create a
Web that had a sense of place. And that was really the birth of VRML. And my friend Tony
Parisi moved to San Francisco. He and I got together and in a week we worked at the basics
of what became VRML. VRML is what we call "connective intelligence". Even though
I’m credited with the invention of VRML, it is a process of a community of people -
over 2000 people all over the world, America, Italy, France, Germany, Japan - who connect
via the Internet to discuss the development of the language, to refine it, to contribute
to its development. So what we are seeing is a community process, which has given birth to
VRML. The process is the important point because the process is the key. More and more in
the future we will see that standards will not come from companies, they will come from
communities that rise up to meet a need.
Question 3
You have defined three phases in the development of VRML: connective, collective and
corrective phase. Can you explain these three phases?
Answer
All communities really go through three phases. The first is the connective, that is
getting people together. On the Internet that can be a mailing list, or a Website, or a
newsgroup. It is the place where people can exchange ideas. And they have to be in a place
to exchange ideas before they can begin to form a community. Once you have that connection
between them, people start acting collectively. They will start working in groups,
they’ll start working toward a common end. Once they start working toward common ends
and common goals, they start to become conscious of what those goals are that cause them
to correct their own path as they approach the goals. So what we see are three phases:
connecting, acting collectively and then the collective acting correctively to refine its
path.
Question 4
Citing Manturana and Varela, you call "structural coupling" the way in which
biological systems organise themselves, answering to the sources of information that come
from environments. You define this as the key quality of each living system. Can you tell
us something about this?
Answer
Structural coupling is a phenomenon that is universal in all biological systems.
Essentially it means that in order for you to grow as a system, you have to be able to
encounter other systems and adapt to them. So that means that as you structurally couple
between two systems, there’s an exchange of information. Every time, for instance, I
say something to you, you change, maybe not physically, but you change inside. You say
something to me, I change. We call this conversation but really it is another way of
talking about structural coupling, and this is the way we engage in a dialogue and this
dialogue may have an end point. Well, that is a structural coupling which has a goal. And
so systems, when they work to create greater systems, when you have two elements that want
to function together, they create a structural coupling between them, and this then
creates a new unity.
Question 5
Well, it seems that three phases in which you distinguish the intelligence, we said before
connective, collective and corrective, allude to an attitude. Would you call them an
ethical phenomenon?
Answer
They are a phenomenon; I do not know if I would call them an "ethic". I think
you’d be wrong to ignore them, in which case it’s not so much an ethic as
it’s an observed phenomena. It is like saying: it is raining outside, if you do not
wear a jacket, you’re going to get wet. For instance, there’s the example of the
large software company which entered the VRML community with the intention of dominating
the community. This large software company ignored the fact that there was a community.
They trampled over the community. The community rejected them because they ignored, if you
like, the ethic of the community. I would say they ignored the laws of the community, and
not in the sense that there are laws written by men but more in the sense that there is a
law of gravity, or a law of chemical analysis. And if you ignore these laws, you will not
be effective.
Question 6
Has VRML grown as you expected?
Answer
It certainly has exceeded my wildest hopes in terms of how popular it has been, but I
think the reason is that anyone who wanted to contribute to VRML was able to make a
contribution. When you give that kind of opportunity to people, they react emotionally.
And when you have people having an emotional contribution to something, when they can
say,. I’ve helped create this too, there’s a bond there that you cannot ignore.
So is it successful? Yes. It’s successful beyond my wildest dreams and it makes me
very happy because its not my success, it’s the success of everyone who has
contributed to it. I think what we are seeing now is the cross between interfaces that
were difficult. Now we are on interfaces that are easy but still aren’t sensual, and
now we are going to open the door to interfaces that are sensual, that are tangible,
interfaces that a child can understand.
Question 7
There has been a lot of discussion about the definition of VRML2 with a lot of proposals
from a group of industries. What do you think about this interest from big corporations?
Answer
I think it’s unavoidable that big companies will want to be involved in VRML.
Clearly, there’s money to be made. Any company that can help to define the interface
for the Internet in the future has an inside track to being able to leverage that into
services, into designs that can make them money. The idea is to make sure that they are in
the ecology but they do not dominate the ecology. That means that they have to be placed
on an equal footing with the community. They cannot have more strength than the community
because if they do, they will tell the community what is going on. And that will lead to
the death of the community. And then you end up with something like Windows, where no one
can argue with Microsoft on Windows anymore because Microsoft controls the whole thing.
Well, Windows evolves much more slowly than VRML does. VRML has had detractors, people who
have not liked it from the beginning. But we have been able to answer every one of these
detractors because we have been able to move more quickly than anything else. And that is
because we move together.
Question 8
Do you really think that it is possible to stop the threat from big corporations?
Answer
I don’t think we should stop them, I think we should balance them. You put them into
a balance with other interests because they have a role. Their concerns are legitimate.
They have valid things to offer and valid requests to make but so do the other people in
the academic communities or in the user communities. Unless you are listening to all of
them, you will not be able to come up with something that is balanced.
Question 9
Many young people have become millionaires with software for Internet, like Marc
Andriessen. Do you think you’ll become a millionaire?
Answer
My goal has never been just to make a lot of money off of this. My goals have been to
create new forms. I am very happy with the way things have worked out but no, I am not a
millionaire. Am I disappointed? Absolutely not. Because in fact what I can do is share my
work, I can share my vision with people. And really what I am interested in is creating
things that will allow our children in the 21st century to really be able to have a
tangible sense of what the human field of knowledge is like. I have created a little
application called Web-Earth. Web-Earth shows the Earth in 3-D as it is right now because
it takes live satellite information and creates a 3-D model of the planet with live
satellite. This is like having a globe for us when we were children. But this is live now.
And pretty soon we will be able to zoom in on that globe and find anywhere we want on the
planet. That is what I want. Those are the kinds of things that make me excited; not a
pile of money in the bank, but doing incredible things that can show us the beauty of the
planet. By the way, Marc Andriessen is a very sweet and very smart guy. His success is
very well deserved because he has a vision. He is 24 years old and he knows things no
24-year old should know. It is amazing because he really does understand where all this is
going and I think he is successful because he knew from the beginning not that it was
going to be the most popular computer application ever, but that it was the most important
computer application ever.
Question 10
Let’s speak about VRML 2 and the technological side. What will the characteristics of
this new process be?
Answer
The way you have to think of it is that VRML 1.0 is static and static means that it
doesn’t move. So that is of limited interest. You can create scenes but you cannot
interact with them. You cannot change them. The reason VRML 1 was not interactive was
because there was no way to create interactivity on a PC that would work on a Macintosh or
on a Spark station or on a silicon graphics work station. This was before Java. If we had
known about Java, we would have brought it in from the beginning. As soon as Java became
known to us, we went to the people who were working on it and said: let’s marry VRML
and Java. Java provides interactivity on a cross-platform basis, VRML provides 3-D and
spatiality on a cross-platform basis. So VRML 2.0 is the marriage of Java and VRML to
create 3-D worlds that are interactive.
Question 11
The possibility for different visitors to the VRML world to interact very soon will be a
great step forward in the history of VRML and virtual reality. What do you think will be
the consequences of this virtual interaction?
Answer
I do not think we can even guess right now. It is so broad. I know that we will be able to
create universities that exist only in cyberspace, lecture halls, performances. It seems
like anything that we need to get people together we will now be able to do on the
Internet and we will be able to do it with enough fidelity that people will feel like they
are really there. Right now, people have to type and they have to read text and that is
very mediated, especially if you do not speak the language. For instance, if you are
Italian and you do not read English very well, and you are in a text-based world, you are
going to be lost. Whereas if you are in this world where objects appear as they really
are, they are 3-D, and you are manoeuvring them with other people, it doesn’t matter
if you know Italian or Chinese or German or French or English. So we have this ability to
connect in a way we never did before. So I think that that is going to be an explosion. I
don’t think that we even know all the ways because we haven’t had the tools yet.
It is as if before we had the hammer and the chisel, we knew what Michelangelo’s
David was going to look like. We did not. Right now we are just getting the hammer and the
chisel and pretty soon we will get David.
Question 12
Do you think that this new kind of interaction will change our perception models?
Answer
I think it will radically change our perceptual modes because the whole concept of
proximity is now starting to radically change. It does not matter now if I am in Italy or
if I am in America as long as I can exchange in a faithful conversation with you over the
Internet. So in a sense if it is possible for us to have the same meaningful exchange and
we do not have to be present, well, all of a sudden the Earth has vanished. It is not as
though its got smaller, it is vanished because now you and I are co-present. It is not
dependent on proximity. That means that there are ways of interacting which are no longer
based on the boundaries of place. Now they are based on the boundaries of culture. Now we
can create artificial culture. We can create an environment which is synthetic and which
now presents a common ground for both of us not based on an Italian culture or an American
culture but something we agreed to make. And so what we get is something that is entirely
open-ended. We get people who can collaborate on making a new culture based on their own
feelings in their hearts, not on the feelings of the world around them.
Question 13
Speaking about culture and the new culture on the Net, what is techno-paganism? What
distinguishes it from other groups on the Net?
Answer
Well, number one, there is no such thing as a group called techno-paganism.
Techno-paganism is very personal. It is always very difficult for me to talk about it. You
can see I am probably blushing. It is simply based on a very simple realisation. In the
Renaissance, all art was sacred art. I have been to Santa Croce, I have been to the Duomo,
every inch of the space inside of them is sacred space. It is all dedicated to God. It is
all about man’s relationship to God. Well, we do not have that in 20th century
technology. All we have is technology that is showing us ourselves in our profane, our
non-sacred invocation. Techno-paganism is taking the sacred part of ourselves and putting
it into the computer, putting it into the Internet so that it can reflect back at us that
part of ourselves. Because that was what Michelangelo was showing, that is what Donatello
was showing, that is what Brunelleschi was showing. They are showing us our own sacred
natures. And so we have to learn from them how to bring that back in. There is an
anthropologist, Mercia Eliade, who 50 years ago wrote a book called, "The Sacred and
the Profane" and he understood something. He told us that the sacred is that which
ontologically founds the world. In other words, if you think about it, the centre of every
village in Italy, in Germany, in France is a church. That is because the entire conception
of the world from when those villages were formed was religious. The church is the centre
of life because the sacred is the centre of man’s being. Well, if we are creating
these new worlds in cyberspace, we have to place the sacred part of ourselves within it
because its the only way we will be able to have contact with that part of ourselves while
we are in those worlds. That what techno-paganism is to me.
Question 14
It could be the start of a kind of a new culture that is born in the technological world.
Answer
It is possible. I think of it more as a recovery of the culture we lost touch with during
the Scientific Revolution. During the Scientific Revolution we lost touch. We said, it is
not important because it is irrational, and we forgot that the most important part of
ourselves is the part that doesn’t make sense, is not rational.
Question 15
Do you think that it is possible to use these new languages of technology to produce a new
kind of artistic expression?
Answer
Well, let me put it this way: I know a year ago RAI Television did a project where they
took a painting by Lorenzetti and created a VRML environment out of it so you could
actually go into the painting, a painting that dates from the 14th century. They created a
virtual Sienna from this painting because this is the painting of Sienna. So now we are
starting to see a type of art that you can open up into, that can be very expressive of
many different things. That is just one form. Can we create a whole new set of artistic
expressions? I think we are going to and I think that it might not be the adults who do it
but it might be our children who have grown up with video games and computers everywhere
since they were born because they feel at home in this. When they created this it will not
be something that is alien. It’ll be something that is very close to their own heart.
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