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. 

This work is a prototype for a DVD that explores the ways we picture cultures and cultural events through linear and non-linear visual media. The project bridges the disciplines of cultural and media studies, visual anthropology, philosophy of art and information technologies. The project incorporates photos, video clips, music and other material recorded in Ghana and France and integrates work developed on Media100, Eastgate StorySpace and MacroMedia Director.

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.

The mediated world of contemporary adolescence began taking a definitive shape the first time that a Space Invaders arcade was installed in a fast food stand. Lots of kids lived in order to feed the machine: with coins, feelings, desires and the machine gave them an excitement they lacked in real life. The two player mode made this virtual experience into a social event. In a few years, videogames would be inside everyone's television, creating problems with siblings and school. How could the defender of the galaxy be such an unpopular nerd at school?

For centuries, media informed, told stories, and helped transmit moral structures and tradition. Now, television and audiovisual media seem to function as a replacement for real life experience: the colors become brighter everyday while the urban landscape becomes more gray and video games use graphics and sound to create a greater impression of reality.

As a writer and filmmaker, I am interested in how fiction affects human life. Videogames seem even more addictive than television ever was. Television gives us psychic experiences, while video games are more physical. How long before all of these media merge within the space of teenagers' bedrooms? How will the audience endure the new demands these media are placing upon them? Will it want to interact with the media? Will interactive cinema maintain the three part dramatic structure of more traditional media? How will these new forms of interactive media affect teenage life in suburbia? How will network media react to this situation? How will networks combine the violence, adrenaline rush, and extreme realism of a video game with the passivity of television? How will television's structure and content change in response to the new media?

My presentation explores and dramatizes such questions.

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. 

In 1999 the NSW Breast Cancer Institute (on behalf of BreastScreen NSW) and academics, students and video production staff from UWS Nepean jointly began a research project to document the life stories of fourteen women from non-English speaking backgrounds, and to analyze their ideas about breast health and its maintenance.

This exploration in interculturalism involved
a) Interviewing the women who agreed to take part in the project
b) Making a short documentary film
c) Rewriting the research interviews as stories for a companion booklet
d) Translating each story into the birth language of the teller
e) Involvement of video production students in the making of the documentary
f) preparation of a research report.

Many of the stories include accounts of mothers, friends or relatives who have suffered or died from breast cancer. They provide important documentation of the impact of breast cancer on the families and friends of its victims.

But the stories go further. They show how women from non-English speaking backgrounds approach breast health activities using their migration experience of starting over in a different place and language community. The stories demonstrate the women's capacity to develop and maintain, when assisted by government policy, community safety nets for the education and well being of community members.

The lesson taught by these stories is that breast health cannot be separated from personal health. Continuing to enjoy good health requires the support and encouragement of friends and family and an investment by women themselves in the skills and knowledge needed to stay in touch with new developments.

As an active health strategy, staying healthy might involve activities as varied as developing friendship networks, participating in community education programs, and even learning English late in life. But most importantly for women these days it involves a positive commitment to preventative measures like breast screening so that women can live to enjoy their families and friends.

The project focuses attention on the ways government policy needs to engage more closely with the health perspectives of women, both individually and as communities. It demonstrates the possibility of research which delivers to the host community research outcomes that they can both understand and value (like a video and booklet of stories). But it has shortcomings too which need to be discussed.

The Last Vaudevillian is a road movie about a traveling entertainer and a documentary about an important tradition of non-fiction film. It explores the little-known world of itinerant lecturers who tour around North America showing travelogue movies. The documentary follows one lecturer on tour from New York to Florida in the spring of 1998 as he presents his feature travelogue Cuba at the Crossroads.