Word: gabriels
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...Peter Gabriel. The Genesis grad, whose music videos (Sledgehammer, Steam) have been pixilated eye-poppers, offers options galore in his CD-ROM Xplora 1: Peter Gabriel's Secret World. First you put the singer's face together, which means choosing from a screenful of different mouths, noses, eyes and ears. "You'll know when you've got it," says Mr. Computer Potato Head while you give him a facial. This achieved, you must decide what to do next: Watch one of his music videos? Thumb through his old baby pictures? Choose various cuts by musicians from around the world...
...computer to computer, musician to listener, and everybody's a performance artist. For Gabriel and Rundgren, interactive rock is not just a career move; it is a techno-mission...
...Gabriel there's nothing to lose but fustian notions of who does what in music. "Interactive rock challenges the old roles of artist and audience," he says. "No longer do you have to supply a linear form with a beginning and an end and a singular journey through it. Instead you create an environment, a kind of forest, where people have the option to follow your path through it, or they can plan their own route -- they can see the world you provided as a collage kit. All the barriers that separated education from entertainment and communication are being eroded...
...about being deprived of old auditory pleasures. "There will be times when you just want to listen to music as a one-sense operation," he says, "and there will be other times when you want to sit down and get your hands dirty and play with it." Nor does Gabriel suffer from the traditional artist's skepticism, even fear, of technology's power tools. "I'm a great believer that technology has to go through two waves," he declares. "The first wave can dehumanize, but the second wave, if the response and feedback mechanisms are in place...
...status to the First Church of Interactive Rock -- let's pause and ask what it means for the music market. Even there the predictions are rosy. "We may be a little bit ahead of the curve," says Brian Fargo, the president of Interplay Productions, whose MacPlay software division distributes Gabriel's Xplora 1. "But I think this will be a brand-new market segment that didn't even exist before. It's no longer a question of whether this format will take off but when. I'd say within a year or so it will be a CD-ROM world...