If Brian Boigon has his way, cartoon-filled Spillville will be one of the first cities on the infobahn. Or at least the 1995 television schedule.
__According to Brian Boigon, the best way to zip down the information highway is in a cartoon. This isn't just a bad pun: it's an idea that's generating serious interest in both New York and Hollywood, and it's the subject of intense discussion in meetings with Lorne Michaels's Broadway Video and the William Morris Agency. Boigon's outfit, BB Studios, has just signed a contract with Broadway Video to develop Spillville, the world's first interactive cartoon for television. The demo's ready, and the pilot should be completed by the end of 1994. To work on the project, BB Studios has brought together some of the biggest players in the increasingly overlapping worlds of advanced technology and mass entertainment. Boigon's partner is Stephen Bingham, the founder of Alias Research, which pioneered morphing. The animation company is Core Digital, William Shatner's special effects outfit. And the co-production house, Broadway Video, is a division of Paramount headed up by Lorne Michaels, who brought us Saturday Night Live and The Kids in the Hall.
Boigon himself is an odd guy to be at the confluence of these forces. He's neither a media mogul nor a technophile, but a serious intellectual iconoclast who wears many odd hats: he's a professor of architecture, an artist and novelist, and the North American correspondent for a Tokyo-based think tank called Urban Design Research Inc. UDR addresses problems that will face the 21st-century city, and in a sense, this is what Boigon is best at: solving traffic problems on roads that don't yet exist.
Boigon doesn't look much like a professor. His habitual uniform is a parody of the Bob and Doug Mackenzie school of Canadian couture: baseball cap, down vest, rolled-up Levi's, heavy woolen socks. And he wore this stuff long before grunge slithered onto the market. The Boigon look is not about style; it's about the archival preservation of vintage suburban Canadiana.
And Boigon's conversational patterns are scary - a rapid-fire stream of consciousness that owes equal parts to Jacques Derrida, Lenny Bruce, and Mike Myers. He mixes metaphors indiscriminately, and he seems unwilling to distinguish between the high and the low, routinely dragging high culture through the mud and elevating mud to the status of art. His universe seems to move at about the same pace as Roger Rabbit's. Recently, Doug Cooper caught up with Brian Boigon at his studio in Toronto.__
Wired: What specifically is it about the cartoon that lends itself to cyberspace?
Boigon:
Well, the basic properties of cartoons have everything to do with motion - moving through space, dynamic systems, relating huge pieces of information in short pieces of time - everything that computers would like to be able to do: compress information and redistribute it quickly. Cartoon animation conveys incredible amounts of information in very short periods of time. Take a Warner Bros. chase scene - Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. In mere seconds, you get an entire war - the strategy, the attack, the retreat, the recapitulation. The whole military-industrial complex is reduced to a bunny and a stuttering guy zipping across the landscape. This attribute of cartoon animation - the ability to convey a lot of information in a short period of time - is based on the idea of caricature: you exaggerate prominent features of a face or body to convey its true essence. That's why you can glance at a single still shot of, say, a cartoon rooster, and you already know his personality - he's arrogant, blustering, larger than life.... In short, Foghorn Leghorn.
You're a professional artist and an architect as well as a teacher. When someone like you enters the cartoon world, we can expect something a bit deeper than The Flintstones, something more dense and provocative than Wile E. Coyote. You've chosen to make a cartoon, but I take it we're looking at something far more ambitious than just another typical animation series for TV.
Actually, The Flintstones is profound - think of Fred, the primitive modern. And the Road Runner is an important experiment in three-dimensional modeling - perspective without a vanishing point.
Right. But why specifically the cartoon? You're pretty well known in the design community; for years you've been perched on the edge of cyberspace, wondering about the problems of creating form in virtual space. Why did you decide on the cartoon as a way into that world?
Built into my cartoon is a software concept. You may have heard of "agent-based software," or "valet software." It's a concept being investigated by Apple, Magic Cap, and MIT Media Lab, among others. My cartoons are going to be agents. You'll have your own personal cartoon, and you'll be able to manipulate it in cyberspace.
How? What separates your cartoon agents from the more conventional notions of agent software? Agents by General Magic are graphical secretaries that go out, search databases, and retrieve your phone voicemail; they do practical, useful things. What does a cartoon agent do?
Well, to begin with, it does the bidding of a teenager on the Internet: it retrieves and sends video mail; it'll search and find stuff in the libraries and video stores; it's capable of pirating and sampling sound and image bites. Cartoon agents are like personal, roving editing suites or recording studios. And they have personalities, full-blown personalities. You'll like them. What I'm really designing is a landscape, a complex urban space. A city called Spillville. Spill is one of the first cities on the information highway.
Tell me about Spillville. Is the medium ready? The television we have today is hardly interactive.
You're right. It's not quite ready for full interactivity. But it will be. And we'll be in a position to take advantage of it.
Kind of like Xerox - the company that developed a graphical interface for the personal computer back in the 1970s before anybody really owned a personal computer.
Right. Except that, unlike Xerox, we're going to maintain the rights to the things we've developed.
Do we have to wait until TVs are interactive? When's this cartoon ready to air?
No, no. We're ready, whenever the networks pick it up. It's going to be sold to the major international networks, just like any TV show; we're looking at March '95 to begin the series. We're designing the cartoon as if it were fully interactive, even though, for now, it's an illusion. Kids will be able to contribute to the show, but not in real time. And when TV goes fully interactive, people will already be familiar with the concepts from watching the first phase of the cartoon.
What will I need to get involved? Do I need modem, a PC, a Cray?
To begin with, you'll need a TV and a telephone and, if you have one, a video camera. That way you can send your own footage into the show, and it'll be scanned as content. Kids can become citizens of Spillville even now. You can send in a videotape of your birthday party or send your own drawing, and it might show up in a couple of weeks as the background for a cartoon adventure. This is the illusion: it's a form of delayed interactivity. And this will be available immediately. Kids will also be able to register for a voicemail box, located in Spillville. You're familiar with companion ads in newspapers, where you can leave voicemail for prospective dates?
Right. But surely this won't show up on the screen, as part of the cartoon.
No, but it's part of the culture of Spillville. You become a citizen; you have services. Within six months, there will be video voicemail boxes - SpillBoxes - placed in shopping malls. They'll be like telephone booths; kids can go in and record stuff that will be sent to Spillville and used as background.
How much is all this going to cost a kid?
Well, TV is free, of course, but all the other gear - SpillGear - will cost money. I can't give you exact prices, but it won't be any more expensive than a skateboard. The investment certainly won't be any greater than a gamebox, like Nintendo or Sega.
So kids can buy into this with their own pocket money. And when you do get your own personal agent, do you get to choose what it looks like, or do you have to choose from a cast of predesigned characters?
It's exactly like the car industry. The average user will buy a stock model, with stock options; a more adventurous sort will buy a sporty model; the more technologically inclined will customize.
You mean, if I knew what I was doing, I could build my own agent?
Yes, you'd trade stock parts, bring in your own bits. The kind of kid who builds hot rods will do this. The kind of kid who's a combination of computer nerd and car nerd will get a real kick out of Spill.
And down the road? Am I going to need expensive equipment to take advantage of the more complex interactive functions?
What you'll need will be there, as an everyday appliance, in every home. There are two arguments as to what it's going to look like. Some people say the TV is going to become a telecomputer; that's what George Gilder insists in his book Life After Television. Others say that the computer's going to become more of a TV. I happen to be in the first camp. But either way, we'll be ready.
So when the TV evolves, and people upgrade their gear, everybody will have the necessary equipment to tune into Spillville.
Exactly. The first TVs couldn't receive color, for instance - but the consumer product evolved with the software. The TV will continue to evolve and have new capabilities each year, like the car. As TVs become more capable, our cartoon programming will become more and more sophisticated and more interactive with our audience. What's unique about the Spillville series is that we developed a strategy for making the cartoon fully interactive when the technology becomes available.
So you're gambling that in the future, TV watchers will be buying their own personal cartoon agents from BB Studios, to act, in a sense, as robots, agents in cyberspace.
The robot's a good analogy. Cartoons are kind of monobots: they do one thing only, and they do it well. The Road Runner escapes. The Coyote self-destructs. I began to look at the cartoon as a way of moving in and out of cyberspace; it was a way of navigating this space that didn't involve goggles and gloves and helmets. Hence the idea of agents, which can do your bidding in this other world. Agents act on your behalf - they're probes. This is the sort of thing Bruce Sterling has been advocating. Sending out a probe to search a database, grab a video, or download an album is cheap and fast. In my case, it's a question of giving the user a new way of moving through space that doesn't involve tying down your body. Your probe will act on your behalf; you can sit at home, and it will move for you.
The telephone, for instance, freed up the body in this way, gave it another feature - you didn't have to walk down the block to Aunt Mabel's; you could just dial her up. On the other hand, you didn't have to strap your head to the telephone. I see the cartoon as a car, the first car on the information highway.
Isn't that still taking the notion of "highway" a little bit too literally?
Why not? Why not take it literally? You have that option, as long as you keep in mind that you're not just designing the highway, but the urban landscape that floats along beside it. With so-called cyberspace, you're dealing with this fiction, a projection of an environment that really doesn't exist. Everybody would like to see it exist, but it doesn't. Cyberspace has no inherent form. Its shape comes through metaphor.
And your preferred metaphor comes straight out of Kerouac, or maybe Easy Rider: the open road. It's very American.
It's very Canadian. Canada's a big country, and there's a sense of vastness here that I'm not sure exists in the US. The pioneer cyber-vehicles were the aboriginal canoe and the European rail, devices adapted to get the Canadian colonizing machine from point A to point B. It's important to get the metaphor right, and I think "information highway" is almost the right metaphor. Actually, I prefer to think of it as a river. In my cartoon, it's called the Nile. River banks are like databanks; they collect information - silt. The Nile is the Great Collector. Rivers evolve, they meander; they're far richer than highways.
If you look at the electronic field as a space in itself, there are only a few genres that have gained any momentum in terms of giving that field form. One is the genre of the paper office, which Apple rightly appropriated in creating its basic desktop interface - the file folder, the pencil crayon. And the other principal genre is the cartoon. Videogames, post-pinball technologies, build very much on work done by the studios - Disney and Warner Brothers in the '20s and '30s - which I've been studying in some depth. It's fascinating. Remember the rural landscape of Warner Bros.'s Bugs Bunny Show? Well, Spillville is a three-dimensional place, somewhat similar to that.
What do you mean by 3-D? How can a television give us three dimensions?
Spill is an actual place. Unlike the cell animation of Bugs Bunny, the landscape of Spill will persist through time. Your agents can move in and around objects, can live there. Think of e-mail: it doesn't disappear when you turn off your computer. Spill is a rural town, the size of Mayberry or Bedrock.
So when I'm sleeping and my TV is turned off, Spillville will continue to have a life; it will carry on in my absence.
That's right. Another difference between Spill and Mayberry is that my city's a bit chaotic, like a real city. A bit gritty. We're going to put some dirt into this cartoon. My cartoon is computer generated, but it's not obsessed with that fact. In the digital domain, you're always coming across this obsession with the clean, dry, and high - as opposed to the shit, dirt, and dust of the analog. The digital mentality is very neurotic about cleaning up reproduction.
Reproduction should look more like sex. It's messy. You talked about the paper office that Apple appropriated to create its desktop: with Spill you're dramatizing the trash can in the corner? Unfolding the mysteries of the Apple trash can?
Exactly. And children know the value of excremental culture. They know the value of the dirty, of the profane. And this is what makes comedy. Let's face it - shit's funny. (Laughs.) Shit happens, and it's funny. Children are less inclined to gloss over the unpleasant aspects of life: they're fully engaged. OK, so we have a city called Spill, and a number of people live there. I have two main cartoon characters, Rom and Ram. They're pranksters.
Let's talk about these names, Rom and Ram. On the one hand, they're supposed to be simple and ridiculous - like the Flintstones - on the other, I take it there's some deeper association.
There's a relationship to Romulus and Remus, the mythical brothers whose little spat gave rise to the Roman Empire. Romulus dug the first ditch on which the foundation of Rome was built, and Remus ridiculed this ditch, so Romulus killed him. Romulus and Remus play this interesting role, you see, as the combative brothers who give rise to urbanism.
Also, of course, these are clearly names from the everyday world of computing.
Read Only Memory and Random Access Memory are two basic terms for various attributes of technological memory-based systems, both software and hardware. But that's not all. There's R and R: not only Rom and Ram, but rock and roll, rest and relaxation. We're playing with this idea of R and R as this thing which moves from high to low, from pop to sci-fi.
Only I don't have to know any of this to enjoy the cartoon or to use one of these guys as an agent.
Not at all. It's just there, in the structure of things. You probably don't know how your word processor really works, but you know how to use it. Now, Rom and Ram live in a forest. There are two forests in Spill: There's the Dim Sum Forest, which consists of image-bank trees; and there's the Karaoke Forest, where the vegetation consists of a bunch of sound samples. Rom and Ram are plugged into the Dim Sum Forest.
It sounds like fun, but what the hell is an image-bank tree?
It's a storage device for images. It's a TV and a VCR rolled into one, and it looks like a tree. Rom and Ram and other cartoon agents use the trees; they watch them like TVs. And there's the Spill Farm, which is an image-sampling farm. The Spill Farm is an editing facility, where images are brought in by Rom and Ram, and others, to be cultivated, edited. And then there's a whole other area for games and entertainment, a sort of recreational theme park.
It's a bit silly.
I hope so. We're hoping to appeal to the teen market, ages 10 to 14. Then we'll bridge into young adults. But silly is important. The city has a mountain in the middle of it, known as Spill Mountain; and on Spill Mountain lives the infamous wizard, Dr. D. Igital. Dr. D polices the city, using TV 'copters to make sure that Rom and Ram and others keep in line. The information highway runs right through the center of Spill; as I said, it's called the Nile.
I can begin to see the drama here: a battle between the fascists and the hackers. Dr. D versus the pranksters. But what about interactivity?
Rom and Ram are agents, they're valets, they do the bidding of two live-action characters called Cola and Amigo. You'll see these guys on the screen as well; but they're not cartoons, they're real teenagers. Remember Max Headroom? How he interacted with real people? Or Roger Rabbit, Cool World? In these films, real filmic images shared space and interacted with cartoon characters. Cola and Amigo are not sitting in front of computer terminals; they're in a room, screaming at Rom and Ram. Cola is a 13-year-old girl - a real girl - who lives in a loft built above her parents' cars in their suburban garage. Amigo's a teeny-bopper rock star who lives in an RV. His parents rip him off; they take all the money he makes performing, and they live in nice hotels and drive a 1978 white El Dorado. Amigo lives in his RV in the underground parking garage beneath whatever hotel his parents are staying in. Amigo's last name is Cocktail - Amigo Cocktail. These two are pretty representative of youth culture, which in my mind is made up of music, movies, and premarital sex.
Actually, speaking of music, we've just signed Mark Mothersbaugh to do all the music. To score the animation and write the theme song. Remember Devo? Mark Mothersbaugh invented Devo; he was the founder.
I was a big fan. I've always wondered where those guys disappeared to.
They're in Spillville. We gave them an apartment, rent free. I see it taking five years for the telecommunication networks and cable companies to refine a two-way video-on-demand system. And five more years to make television hardware receptive enough not to get in the way of real time interactivity: Roseanne and your kid have to be able to interact in real time.
I don't have a kid.
But by the time you do, she'll be able to dance with Roseanne Arnold. And by that time, Spillville will be completely interactive. Finally, Spill will become a city for the users. Rom and Ram will not be the only agents sleeping in the Dim Sum Forest, but yours will be as well. So when you subscribe to Spill - the way you would subscribe to an online service - you will become a citizen of Spill. And Spill will act as a city in which you get certain services, but you will also be able to act and contribute to the cartoon through your personal valet.
You won't have to be highly techno-literate to get involved: you need to know how to watch TV. If you can watch TV and punch a phone number into a phone, you can play.
If you told people a hundred years ago that they'd each own a car, they would have laughed at you. I'm telling you, in 10 years, everybody will own a cartoon.
