Presented from a developer's point of view and illustrated with examples from the Shoah Foundation's new CD-ROM, Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust, this paper discusses the impact that integrating multiple forms of traditional media has on the narrative, graphical, and cinematic structures of the emerging new media project. 

Digital multimedia and its territorial locations -- cyberspace -- has been portrayed as liberatory, enslaving, or revolutionary. This paper explores the nature of narratives of multicultural societies in multimedia, through the specific example of an Australian project - Making Multicultural Australia. The paper argues that multimedia has the potential to offer multi-focal cross-cultural spaces for exploration of competing narratives of the social. Based on over six years of intensive research, and on materials collected over thirty years, the CDROM project, Making Multicultural Australia tells the many stories of struggle, setback and triumph that have formed contemporary Australia. Originally conceived as a book which would capture a "people's history" of Australian cultural diversity, it became one and then three CDROMs, an incalculably rich source of ideas, experiences, information and controversy. 

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? -- Abraham Lincoln

Beauty and truth have two poles: documentary and fiction. You can start with either one. My starting point is documentary to which I try to give the truth of fiction. -- Jean Luc Godard

A multi-media presentation, Elective Documentary Fictions focuses on technology and popular journalism; subjective reporting and fictional documentary; public art in electronic space; and participatory democracy. It explores these issues in the context of the most recent project of our art and technology collaboration, Democracy-The Last Campaign (D-TLC). The discussion situates D-TLC within an overview of mainstream media's coverage of American electoral politics.

This is the fifth consecutive presidential election in which our collaboration has explored the national election process. D-TLC is a yearlong, national inter-media project focusing on the 2000 elections. It includes on-line and physical exhibitions, public programs and forums and publications. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will exhibit D-TLC's web site as part of their Gallery 9 on-line exhibition program.

D-TLC is, in part, a product of research conducted at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) from 1994-1998. As part of the PAIR (PARC Artist-In-Residence) program, we collaborated with PARC researchers Dale MacDonald and Scott Minneman.

Elective Documentary Fictions focuses primarily on the digital components of D-TLC. It positions the web site as one example of the participatory hybrid documents that are appearing in electronic space. Like our 1996 web-based election project Conventional Wisdom, D-TLC is an Internet-based salon functioning as both a forum for a national discussion of issues, and a virtual space for the presentation of work. The site combines photography, real time reporting, analysis and critical fiction and memoir. It accommodates a changing series of contributions by both invited artists and writers and unsolicited viewers.