On Tuesday, April 9th, 1996 the first meeting of "Art Works," a multimedia forum by the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council, met at 101 Federal Street, Boston. It was an unusually sleety and nasty cold day for April; people shuffled in and scouted a chair well after the 7PM starting time. Twenty-odd adults, most with name tags, sat awkwardly around a long table. One by one programmers, CDROM developers, web designers, artists, writers, and other folks who considered themselves multimedia professionals introduced themselves.

According to the flyer, MIMC-Art Works is dedicated to the exploration of interactive media as a new art form. The first meeting was certainly more of a warm discussion than any sort of debate. An artist fondly recounted her experience creating multimedia installations; a programmer described the joy he found in creating video games. Several people, myself included, expressed excitement at the new forms of community and collaboration implied by multimedia art forms. There was hardly a devil's advocate in the group.

Among the issues discussed were: What is multimedia? How does one define the 'user' of a multimedia piece? What does multimedia do that is different from other forms of art in which participants actively engaged with the art and with other people, such as folk dance? On a more esoteric note, can we call multimedia 'fine art'? And, on a more practical note, how can corporations bring themselves up to the task of exploring multimedia in all its possibilities?

Clearly there were some questions that would never be answered. Noone claimed to be able to define "multimedia." A Martian overhearing the forum might come away with the same vagueness one has in describing God or any other large and unwieldy concept. The aforementioned artist said it herself: "It's everything": sound, imagery, interactivity. Even on that point there was vagueness. What is interactivity? Someone claimed that being able to choose paths and outcomes is not true interactivity; true interactivity requires the user to participate in the act of creation itself. Here again I sensed a debate that might have but did not take root. The conversation only lightly touched on the origins of interactive multimedia; the Exquisite Corpse and other Surrealist parlor games are surely reborn in new guise as web-based collaborative art.

Predictably, there was not a soul in the room who would deny the artfulness of multimedia as a form. There was also unanimous agreement on the power of multimedia -- whatever it is. The undefinability of multimedia seemed to be where its attraction lie. Multimedia is a web, an infinite grid, a structure with no structure; it transforms audience into users, users into participants. It is layered, empowering, and, if well-designed, exciting as hell.