Cyberworlds: computers and connections

Digital Media
extending our creative horizons

For many years people have used painting, writing, printing, photography and electronic media to communicate across time an distance.
Now a new media revolution is under way. The computer allows us to combine words, sounds and pictures to form interactive multimedia. It also allows us to create sounds and images we sometimes find hard to distinguish from reality.

This section looks at how we use computers to create and communicate. It also explores developments that are transforming how we engage with photography, music, television and cinema.

Edison Kinetoscope
Edison Kinetoscope
In 1889, five years after George Eastman developed celluloid film, Thomas Edison cut pieces of film into long strips to use in a cinema camera (kinetograph). Edison’s associate William Dickson then developed a sprocket system for the kinetograph, and later for the projector (kinetoscope), that could move the film past a lens when turned by a crank. Gift of F H Leydecker. 92/1895; B1887–1:2

Enigma cipher machine
Cybertype
Desktop publishing software allows designers a seemingly infinite variety of ways to manipulate type. Printed letters can be distorted and merged with photographic images or layered on top of each other. However in cyberspace type is liberated from the static confines of the printed page. In Cyberspace the computer absorbs not only the printing press, but also the video and tape recorder. Here type can be combined with speech and animation to create multi-sensory, interactive experiences.
www.footaction.com image courtesy of Attik Design Limited

Severed Heads video still
Severed Heads
Sydney band Severed Heads are known for experimental as well as techno dance music. In the early 1980s the group’s now archetypal electronic sound was ahead of its time. By the end of the decade, with the emergence of techno as an umbrella term, the world caught up. Severed Heads became the first Australian act to crack the Billboard dance charts. Constantly innovating, the group continues to experiment with video, the internet and CD-ROM.