"Grips its enthusiasts with such fervor that they often forget the passage of time, family, friends and school!"

"Talk for free to the rest of the US and Canada. Play games without having to travel."

Sound familiar? Computers? The Internet? These quotes appeared in the mid-thirties to describe the growing phenomenon of "Ham" Radio.

My father was a Ham. WIHKK. He talked around the world from his little red Radio Shack down near the beach in Newburyport, Massachusetts using antennas built from 2x4's and bailing wire.

"CQ, CQ, contest double you, one, aitch, kay, kay calling Shanghai. Double you, one, aitch, Halifax, kay, kilowatt, kay, kilowatt, Dana W. Atchley Jr. of Newburyport, calling Shanghai."

My grandparents, who were born before cars and the asphalt highway, thought he was crazy. How could he ever earn a living doing that?

While my father tapped out code I created plays and rummaged through old trunks filled with family memorabilia which were stored in an adjacent room. There were old letters and clothes, photo albums and a stereopticon. There were boxes of stereo images including several of my great grandfather. The year was 1865. The frontier of interactivity in those days consisted of an intimate couple sharing a stereopticon: one viewing the image; the other reading the caption on the reverse. Wonders of the World, War, Romance and Comedy were favorite subjects.

My father cared little about the memories. His main interest was talking to as many people in as many countries as possible. What puzzled me was that once he made contact all he was interested in was the height of their antenna and the strength of their signal.

My uncle gave me my first camera at age seven: a Brownie Twin Lens Reflex. I have every image I have taken since that age on an increasingly sophisticated and expense variety of formats. My life is one defined by the images I have collected; my art, the reconstruction of these images into stories: during the seventies as Ace Space with a traveling Roadshow, in the eighties as a producer of Video Postcards for broadcast television, and now as a digital storyteller with Next Exit.

My primary focus as an interactive performer is storytelling: a good narrative and a sense of a journey with a beginning, middle and end. Though I consider Next Exit a work-in- progress, I want each performance to have a sense of completion: End of the tour. Go on home! . Get on with your life! It has not escaped my notice, however, that this new digital media acquires a life of its own. Will the cemeteries of the 21st century be filled with interactive kiosks of lives lived?

Over the two decades that I have been performing, I have felt constrained by available technologies. Too slow! Too complicated! Too expensive! Too fragile!

The solution: TA DA ...Interactive Multimedia! In the seventies, as Ace Space, I would never have uttered the word Multimedia. which connoted the worst kind of institutional slide show. But in my own way, Multimedia was exactly what I was doing.

I dragged my heels a bit on digital video. I came from the broadcast world and worked on a million dollar Quantel Harry. But friends were whispering in my ear "Get a Mac. Get a Mac." In fact one actually gave me a Mac which I placed on a table and eyed warily for several months before turning it on. I knew the routine: "The first one is free." And I knew I would be hooked from the moment I plugged it in.

Times have changed! I have replaced my Ikegami with a Sony Hi8mm Camcorder and the Quantel Harry with Adobe Premiere and Photoshop. Using a Mac, QuickTime and a Radius VideoVision Studio card under the control of Macrowedia Director I am able, on stage, to control the sequence of stories and the pacing of the show. I can draw on a video suitcase containing up to two hours of material. I can seamlessly move from one story to another and have my lighting, keyboard and machine control cues and sets automatically follow. I can pause and continue. I can even offer the audience choices. This is more like it!

While devouring new technologies, I also want the freedom of an old time campfire storyteller who could conjure up any vision from the flames. My flames are the cool flickering of a video campfire.

For the first time in my life I feel as if the state of my vision and the state of technology are running apace. I have the same feeling my father must have had when he raised his first antenna and heard a voice from Shanghai.

When I acquired a black & white portapak in 1972 we thought we were going to change the world with this new tool. A handful artists were unable to achieve that goal, but a world full of camcorders, VCR¹s and CNN is accomplishing exactly that.

We are finally realizing the Global Village, that McLuhan envisioned, but one where, in a slight twist of his oft stated axiom: The medium is not THE message; the medium and the message are, inseparably, ONE.

Last summer I was driving back to Crested Butte, Colorado where I had bought this old house in the late sixties. I was trying to figure out how I could spend more time up in the mountains; maybe actually earn a living. I was dreaming of my own Digital Dream Cabin and an online world of Digital Penny Candy transactions.

A flag person stopped me while a road crew moved a large truck into position. They were digging a deep narrow trench.

"What are they putting in that trench?"

"Fiber optic cable!"

"Ahhhh!"

So, you see my vision of the future?

Let's hit the road!