Technoids in tuxes strut their stuff at New York's cyberaward bash
By MARK SCHAPIRO
Like a bewildered reception line at the wrong wedding, the cream of New York's cyber-community stretched down the block on New York's East 14th street last night outside, of all places, the Palladium. The new media glitterati hadn't come to the venerable disco castle to strike virtual Travolta poses, however, but to attend the first annual I-Magic Awards, a black-tie affair honoring the finest purveyors of interactive media. The $3 million event, the highlight of what Mayor Rudolph Giuliani declared to be "New York, New Media" week, staked New York's claim to be at the center of America's cyberia.
The majordomos of Silicon Alley (the Big Apple equivalent of San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch) were all there: bigwigs from Sony and Adobe rubbed shoulders with execs from Avalanche Productions, Razorfish, and Silicon Graphics. For some, the sight of the new media crowd in full tux regalia was a sign that the wild electronic frontier was being civilized. "This is not just a bunch of kids sitting around inventing things anymore; it's a whole new industry," said festival director Bonnie Halper. "And the black ties reflect that." Indeed, the event, co-sponsored by industry heavies like IBM, Apple, AOL, Frankfurt Balkind and KPMG Peat Marwick, seemed designed to send a not-so-subliminal message that the new industry -- with 18,000 employees, the biggest media employer in New York -- was at least the equal of the movie business, in terms of creativity if not star power.
The 1,000 people in attendance were treated to a full panoply of high-tech visuals -- an installation of 50 televisions, a psychedelic light show of swirling colors -- as emcee Charles Fleischer (the voice of Roger Rabbit) loosened up the crowd, many of whom seemed far from familiar with their cummerbunds, with borscht-belt humor with a cyber twist. ("Welcome to a different kind of disco...a hard disco driver.")
The awards presentation posed a creative problem. The organizers billed the ceremony as the "Academy Awards for interactive media" -- but how to present awards for an interactive medium to a passive audience, and to "stars" who were literally behind the scenes? The effective solution was to display the technology itself -- as in a dazzling dance performance that utilized a new technology, developed by Pixound, that correlated colors to musical notes. Each nominee was introduced with a visual feast, a montage of images from their work appearing on the overhead screens like a Magritte-inspired hallucination.The award-givers, who seemed strangely out of place, drawn as they were from "old" media, included AT&T huckster Larry "Bud" Melman, late of Letterman, and Jonathan Katz (Comedy Central's Dr. Katz). They handed out awards to the likes of IVI Publishing (for their CD-ROM "Living with HIV") and the Center for Advanced Whimsy (for "Dazzeloids.") All the while, a New York performance artist, Anita Liberty, pounded the keys in a kiosk stage right in an on-line cybercast dialogue through Prodigy.
Some of the veteran new media guard were bemused by the goings-on. CD-ROM creator and visual artist Rodney Alan Greenblat, who describes his winning work as a "demented interactive storybook for kids and 35-year-old kids," observed that there are "a lot of hippies in this business, but tonight they're supposed to be grown-ups for a night. I think the computer industry would love to be Hollywood, but I wish they'd stop trying. " Resplendent in a wildly stitched shirt and coat, he added, "this is almost corporate. I bet less than one percent of the people here take heroin regularly. At the old Palladium, a third of the people there would be taking heroin, or cocaine, or something regularly."
The long shadow of Big Money also hung over the two days of panel discussions that accompanied the awards ceremony. Held in the cavernous open floors of the new, thoroughly wired Information Technology Center, which Mayor Giuliani has subsidized in hopes of filling its nine vacant floors with high-tech companies, these gatherings seemed less concerned with trumpeting the anarchic spirit of the great democratic Internet than with tapping the Web's multi-billion dollar business potential (loudly proclaimed by the Wall Street Journal in a special "technology" section on Monday.) Other than such "up from the underground" types as Marise Bowe of Word and Elvis Costello-spectacled Craig Kanarick of Razorfish, who was just in from a similar conference in Stockholm ("I could go to one of these a week"), it was mostly suits. "There's nothing on God's green earth that won't be sold over the Internet," said Joseph McCambley, Creative Director of Modem Media.
The suits were doubtless gladdened by some of the figures being tossed about. According to Jupiter Research, $55 million in ads were sold on the Internet last year, with ad sales doubling each year and potentially reaching as high as $800 million to $1 billion annually by the turn of the century.
Perhaps of necessity, the new generation of web-sters don't quite have the ironic attitude towards business that underground publishers from an earlier era did. In a panel on Interactive Advertising, Kanarick extolled the possibilities of a entirely new approach to advertising -- "relationship advertising," a technique aimed at engaging and interacting with the viewer rather than the repeated-exposure goal of traditional advertising. John Povick, of Columbia University's Center for Media Studies, said that web advertising may change the corporate culture itself -- with 90,000 corporate web sites, each searching for a new way to engage their potential reader/consumer, "20 years from now you may have an entirely new corporate culture that is more interactive."
Other panelists exhibited a touch of humility about working with a technology that has so far yielded precious little revenue. Asked about his vision of the "Internet in the next century," Matt Rothman, a Senior Vice President at Sony working on new technologies, responded dryly, "The Internet? What Internet?"
New York writer Mark Schapiro is a frequent contributor to Salon.