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A L S O__T O D A Y The 21st Challenge No. 15 Results By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau Haiku for telemarketers - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Is free software finally gaining ground in the OS wars? Discuss Linux vs. NT and others in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Martin Luther, meet Linus Torvalds By Thomas Scoville Linux and free software challenge the Microsoft papacy (11/12/98) Is there such a thing as a software monopoly? By Mike Romano Microsoft says no -- and its arguments could provoke changes in the antitrust laws (11/11/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg The New Yorker's portrait of PointCast displays once more the magazine's Internet ignorance (11/10/98) Music industry to webcasters: Pay up! By Janelle Brown Will the new copyright law's rules help Web radio flourish -- or smother the infant medium? (11/09/98) The ghosts in our machines By Andrew Brown "TechGnosis" traces the secret mysticism that motivates our love affair with technology (11/06/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST REVIEW ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - 21st Log HotWired advertiser sponsors a blackout - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

"Griffin & Sabine's" letters go digital - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE" CD USES INTERACTIVE ANIMATION AND ISABELLA ROSSELLINI TO BRING A POSTCARD ROMANCE TO YOUR SCREEN. BY SCOTT ROSENBERG When I started reviewing CD-ROMs six years ago, heaps of hardware requirements, incompatibilities and other technological hurdles stood in the way of enjoying the new products. In those days a CD-ROM review was, of necessity, as much a bug report as a work of critical thought. Some day, I dreamed, we'd get beyond all that -- and be able to talk about what imaginative artists were doing in the new medium without having to apologize for all the trouble it took to experience their work. It hasn't worked out that way. Nearly every computer sold today comes with a CD-ROM drive. Yet bad products and technical glitches gave the entire CD-ROM format a bad name, while the Web came along and provided better diversions and more timely information. Today, outside of the game industry, major creative projects for CD-ROM are an endangered species. And so the arrival of "Ceremony of Innocence" -- an adaptation of the "Griffin & Sabine" trilogy for CD-ROM by Peter Gabriel's Real World Multimedia company -- comes as a strangely atavistic surprise, a throwback to the early '90s heyday of CD-ROM art. Even at this late date, "Ceremony" is not immune to technological snafus -- confirming that this medium will never achieve the kind of success its pioneers hoped for. But the playful, visually exquisite disk is good enough, both as a tale and as a multimedia production, to show us what we're missing as we allow this potential art form to wither. "Griffin & Sabine," the popular book by Nick Bantock (followed closely by "Sabine's Notebook" and "The Golden Mean"), tells how a brooding English artist -- Griffin -- one day begins to receive cryptic postcards from a mysterious woman in the South Seas -- Sabine -- who seems to have telepathic access to his paintings and sketches. The form was more interesting than the tale: Bantock unfolded his epistolary narrative via artful, symbolically laden postcards and niftily designed letters, stuffed into actual envelopes glued to the book's pages, making the reader an eavesdropper on the characters' intimacies. At first, the notion of translating such a proudly physical work into the disembodied digital realm seems to make no sense: What could a computer screen possibly add to the "Griffin & Sabine" experience to make up for the loss of the book's paper pleasures and tactile seductions? "Ceremony of Innocence" provides thoroughly persuasive answers, chiefly in the form of designer Alex Mayhew's uniquely inventive animations. One of the grand problems of multimedia design has always been, how do you hook a user with a narrative while also rendering a story "interactive"? There have been endless efforts to solve this problem, some remarkable, many ridiculous. "Ceremony's" response is to sidestep the issue. The tale of Griffin and Sabine proceeds in linear fashion, letter by letter and postcard by postcard; but each individual missive has been turned into a miniature interactive artwork. Lizards and birds and bugs on stamps go on cross-screen rampages; a goldfish swimming in a goblet smashes through the glass and wags its fins across the page, smudging the postcard ink; a rose sprouts from a seashell, and its roots stretch slowly across the screen to open the flap of an envelope. The designs are creative not only in their images but in how they respond to your input. "Ceremony" relies on neither the old "Living Books"-style "click on something to see what it does" approach nor the "Myst"/"Seventh Guest" gambit of "solve this fiendish puzzle before you can find out what happens next." Instead, each new card or letter in "Ceremony" engages you in a different way. Sometimes the cursor gets transformed into a moon or is swallowed by a beast or even disappears altogether. Sometimes you sit back and watch a little show; other times you must intervene for the show to proceed. The feeling is less one of problem-solving -- how do I get past this thing? -- than simple goofing around. And the payoff in clever, droll, imaginative visions is clear and immediate. The other chief advantage "Ceremony" has over its paper counterpart is the addition of voices -- specifically, those of Paul McGann and Isabella Rossellini, whose limpid accent brings a note of sultry exoticism to her character. (Ben Kingsley has a cameo as a sinister interloper in the couple's saga.) In the lengthier letters, the voice-overs take over while "Ceremony" makes the words quite literally come alive -- the text dances elusively on screen. (Just don't try to read along.) "Ceremony" isn't perfect: Among other things, the disk brings more to center stage Bantock's references to Yeats' "The Second Coming," and the poem's grim foretaste of apocalypse makes a jarring counterpoint to "Griffin & Sabine's" predominantly playful designs and romantic yearnings. Nonetheless, this is the kind of adaptation that makes you see more in the original work than you originally thought there was; it enhances rather than diminishes its material. Which is why I'm sorry to report that, at this late stage in the life of the CD-ROM medium, "Ceremony" is still, like so many of its predecessors, prone to strange bugs and glitches that stop you in your tracks. I'll spare you the dull details of "script errors" and quirky cross-platform behavior (the disk runs on both Windows and Mac systems); just know that, if it weren't for the "cheats" provided to members of the press, I'd have never gotten past the first half dozen postcards. If you aren't frightened by the occasional program crash, "Ceremony" is still worth hunting down. Released last year in the United Kingdom, it has only recently found a North American distributor. Today, selling artistic CD-ROMs is a vanishing business. Let's just hope that the creativity behind worthwhile projects like "Ceremony of Innocence" doesn't disappear as well. SALON | Nov. 13, 1998 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - E-mail Scott Rosenberg.