For two and a half glorious years I worked at a new media publishing company called Voyager. Now it seems a time and place as remote as the deserted island on Myst. This was pre-web or at least pre-mosaic. Our medium was CD-ROMs, with their weird spelling and incredibly small capacity. I became interested in the company when they were still in California before they moved to New York when I saw a CD-ROM called I Photograph to Remember. It was something new and in a way something very old. A photographer named Pedro Meyer had created a slide-show of photographs of his parents. It had an accompanying soundtrack in English and in Spanish. It also had navigation controls that remained hidden until a cursor was run down to the bottom of the screen. You could stop it and read text, you could navigate by year, and by subject. It was linear and non-linear. It was black and white, it was intimate, it was powerful and made people cry. Now people famously say the Internet doesn't make people cry well this did. It wasn't a book, it wasn't a film, it was something else entirely. It led to my working and creating "new media" as a producer for the past decade. For years now at various jobs and ventures I've been trying to go backward and instill the spirit of Voyager into the work I've been doing but now it is time to move forward and away from that.
Over the past few years it has felt at times that everything I've been involved with has been all about marketing and less the spirit of discovery that pulled me into the field and that has made me nostalgic for the brief window of the new that was Voyager.
This year as I worked with RiverKeeper and participated in MoveOn I began to feel flush with a new kind of excitement about the power and creative energy that the Internet is unlocking. I get my news from Blogs, I look at playlists on ITunes and I realize that I've been following the new for years. So I'm leaving the ghost of Voyager behind not so much to desert the spirit of invention that pulled me into the field but to rekindle it and begin looking and appreciating the new types of invention that are all around. And so I'm launching this blog.
I've set up blogs and used the technology for many sites including most recently Ron Suskind's for the book The Price of Loyalty but have never stepped up to the plate myself. I plan to cover emerging technology, trends, sites, and other things that catch my interest in my work as a consultant and creator of new digital products and hope that people will look into from time to time.
See I photograph to Remember online
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catbobcat (crossing a road in Redding, CT.) blogging