On February 7, 1991, Dr. Edmund Skellings presented a retrospective at the IBM Multimedia Interdivisional Technical Liaison Conference in Boca Raton, Florida. The audience represented IBM multimedia developers from around the globe. Since there were more attendees than space in the main auditorium, the overflow audience viewed the lecture and computer demonstrations on video in the cafeteria. Dr. Skellings' presentation was videotaped by PostEdge and excerpts of it are available in a video biography called NEARING THE MILLENNIUM produced by the Florida Center for Electronic Communication.

On February 7, 1991, Dr. Edmund Skellings presented a retrospective at the IBM Multimedia Interdivisional Technical Liaison Conference in Boca Raton, Florida. The audience represented IBM multimedia from around the globe. Since there were more attendees than space in the main auditorium, the overflow audience viewed the lecture and computer demonstrations on video in the cafeteria. (Soon after, he would by invitation present the same material at Thomas Watson Research Laboratory in Armonk, New York.) Dr. Skellings' presentation was videotaped by PostEdge and excerpts of it are available in a video biography called NEARING THE MILLENNIUM produced by the Florida Center for Electronic Communication.

After an introduction by Scott Winters of IBM, Dr. Skellings delivered his speech as follows:

Good morning. I have been thinking for a couple of weeks about how I want to present myself to you, what kind of an image I want you to have. Poets worry about image, and that seems appropriate for a multimedia show. My first book was multimedia.

As a matter of fact, I have been in multimedia since I was in the 82nd Airborne. As a paratrooper, I was put in charge of part of the camp newspaper, "The Powerglide." Not only did I learn how to soldier, but I also learned how to handle those terrible people the image makers call photographers and camera people with all their equipment.

When I got out of the 82nd, I went to the University of Massachusetts for my B.A. There was a poet named Dylan Thomas, a Welshman, who was going around reciting poetry. He was reciting a poem I think you all know. It is, "Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage rage against the dying of the light." It is a poem about his father's death. Since Thomas was making so much money, I decided to get a good voice coach and find out whether I could go around as a poet and earn enough money for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

By the time I got to the University of Iowa for my doctorate, I was bringing out a book. It was DUELS AND DUETS. It came out in a limited edition and, because I had done so much reading, the publisher had a unique idea. He said, "How about putting the book on two LP records that slide in and out of the covers?" People bought it and never knew there were records in it, which shows you why we don't get too radical with Version II of anything or Version I of anything. It was even worse on the paperback sales. There were records in this book, too. (Skellings holds up the paperback) It had the face of a 25 year old paratrooper. Yes, I looked like that back in 1958. Fortunately, I haven't changed much at all. This is my last book that came out only a couple of years ago. Now you've got the full imagery of me. I have left out the baby pictures which my mother wanted me to show you.

So I became a multimedia poet interested in the photographic presentation. This was an idea of presenting more of the poet, of getting more of the poet communicating because what the media is about in the end is one man communicating to another man.

It took ages for me going around the microcomputer circuit, arguing with teachers and faculty, saying to them you've got to get a microcomputer, you've got to jump into the revolution. I would say that in the days when Apple was producing a board they called Apple I. My own personal computer was an Intelligent Systems 8K machine out of Norcross, Georgia, that had a Wang disk drive on the side. I began in micros then. I was using 110 baud over the phone line to a Univac.

So I began before the microcomputer industry. The microcomputer seems to me to be a generalized, general purpose mass communications machine. I have always seen computing as a medium of communication of one man with another. It seems to me that I should challenge you to redefine your definition of multimedia. I seem to have to every year I am in it. Now, I have spent 35 years in it and every year it becomes something different. It's protean. It digitizes under your analog hands. I've been someone who went around from university to university around the country talking to faculty about the difference between the analog and the digital worlds.

I have a metaphor I use that you might find useful sometime in talking to people about what our industry is really about. It's the thermometer on the back porch of much interest to Floridians. We can just look at it and know that it's hot, cold, or lukewarm or it's about. On the other side of the thermometer we know exactly because we move from the analog world of infinite gradations of a column of mercury to digital numbers that say precisely what we mean. It's 94. It looks like it's 95. We are discriminating down finer and finer and finer running our numbers out. We could have a decimal digital thermometer that kept going and kept going and gave us bigger and bigger and longer and longer registers. We could compute for it. So, it is simply moving from an impressionistic world that we all share, well, maybe we don't share it, but we think we share it. Maybe our differences are as important as our similarities in our analog world. But in the digital world we can find exact and precise agreements and maybe find out something about objective truth, if there is any, at the same time.

What is this image anyway? The very famous poet Ezra Pound said that, "An image is an emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time." That's his definition. In fact he started the imagist movement in poetry. Notice that emotional is in there, that part of the reaction. It is almost as if he is embedding communication inside the image. It seems to me there are a lot of kinds of images. There are visual images, auditory images, rhythmic images, real images, and imagined ones. A lot of the talk about virtual reality is really simply recording imaginations, recording fictions.

Eric Auerbach, the great scholar who came out of the Second World War, wrote a book called MIMESIS. The subtitle of it was THE REPRESENTATION OF REALITY IN WESTERN LITERATURE. Can you imagine writing that book in a foxhole in South Africa? But he did. He wrote the book, and then later on when he got to the library, he looked up his own footnotes to be accurate about them. What a brilliant man! And it is a brilliant book. I call your attention to it. You've got to read it sometime. What it is mainly about is literature, though, the representation of reality in Western literature. It may be about time for somebody to write a book about the representation of reality in Western magnetic recording, digital recording, the digital mind.

I really do not know what is happening, but I know that computing hasn't changed. It is a way for a man to talk to another. I am in several networks. I will play you a few things and show you some things that I have downloaded from the University of Texas and from around the country. I regularly go out and sweep the boards to see whether anything is new; download everything I can; look at it on Bernoulli disks; wipe the disks of everything that is unimportant and then start over. So I have various unfilled machines around my house half corroding in their contacts, I guess.

At the University of Iowa Typographic Laboratory, we brought this book out. (Skellings holds up COMMA CAT.) I did a little book of poems for my baby sister called COMMA CAT, talking about the spirit of each punctuation mark. The exclamation mark became, "A bat and ball we played with in the park./Oh boy, we won. We're proud." Each poem used its own mark of punctuation. The semicolon was a "comma cat" watching the hole of a mouse and the comma cat was sliding down a bannister with its tail in a hook. I tried to give the spirit of punctuation marks to interest this little girl in reading.

Later on, at IBM, I met the late Don Estridge, a wonderful man, who is responsible really for building all of this place and the PC's. One day I was riding down the Florida Turnpike with Don Estridge and he said, "Tell me about your ideas for coloring poetry."

I said, "We all learned rhyme scheme in school, Don, it was 'AB AB'. You don't have to do that any more. You could change the colors right on the screen because you've already purchased the color in the computer screen."

Don said, "Can you do that in a program?"

I said, "Yes, I can." So out came an authoring system called ELECTRIC POET that allows you to do things like that. And it bears the good old IBM label. I got to know your company from the inside as well as the outside, and therefore like it a lot more. COMMA CAT was authored by that authoring system. Diane Newman, my assistant of 20 years, did DICTIONARY DOG, which teaches children about alphabetical order and how important functional order is in our lives. We always have a little bit of education behind the entertainment. So these were more audio visual products. Scholastic Magazine, I'm proud to say, called COMMA CAT the best interactive teaching software in the U.S.

Any poet, multimedia poet or not, who grows up in New England and has designs on being a major poet, and make no mistake about it every 20 year old poet wants to be a major poet... What was the E.B. White famous remark? "A poet at 20 is 20. A poet at 50 is a poet." I'll let you reel that one around for a while.

Here is that guy you've come to know and love, only this time in sepia sitting with Robert Frost. (Skellings hold up a picture of himself and poet Robert Frost that was taken after Frost did a poetry reading at the University of Iowa. The photograph is in Skellings' book of poems HEART ATTACKS. On the opposite page is a poem Skellings has written as if he were talking to Frost.) I want to show you a little audio/video now by going to the first piece of video. (In the video, Skellings turns out of the "still" picture of himself with Frost and recites a poem called "Frost to Skellings," as if he were talking to Frost.

I thought you would like that little intro roll. I was beginning already to be interested in video and was haunting the video labs. I did my first multimedia video presentation over live broadcast because there was no tape. Gee, I wish they had magnetic tape. We were at the point where we had magnetic wire recorders, at that time, in black and white.

I did a poem called " The Hartford Circus Fire" in memory of when I was about 10 years old and the last big outdoor tent circus went up in flames. It was Ringling Brothers in Hartford and the main tent burned. I did a very long eight-poem cycle about the death of all the children who were watching the entertainment and made it a metaphor for a country so interested in entertainment that it was going to go to its own doom that way. I did that poem and we went out at night and shot some film of a carnival in town. Then inside the television studio, we superimposed it with one camera on the poet's hand writing a poem and another camera on the poet reading. So, we began.

At Iowa, I first began to use colored chalk on the blackboard. It seems to me if we have to get inside language where all the meanings are, we are going to have to use some way of exploding the text and typefaces. Because, you see, we can't get away from text. It is our history. The multimedia world can not escape text any more than I can escape the tradition of Robert Frost. And I shouldn't want to.

Hypermedia is wonderful. We can go from one page to another, click on a button. Oh, I don't want to click on a button. Oh no, give me every word as a button, because every word is connected to every other word. A little later, I will show that to you and try to prove it to you.

I recorded my poetry on paper with a typewriter. Other poets said, "You should continue writing with a pen. You shouldn't write poetry with a typewriter." It was somehow inhuman, inhumane maybe. I am serious! The first talk I gave to a group of writers about using a computer to type on and to keep my poems on disks was at the Suncoast Writers Conference in Tampa. A lady came up afterward and almost physically attacked me for doing something like bringing computing and poetry together. One has to know the nature of the beast or one can't either attack its ignorance or help it at all.

Recording poetry on vinyl. I am a man who has outlasted his own medium. One month ago, RCA Records said they wouldn't press any more vinyl. I am technologically obsolete in my own lifetime. I began with the first record book and watched it become obsolete. Now we have optical disks. All my books are on Bernoulli cartridge. By the end of this year, both video and audio of me and the text of my work will be on a CDI. I am trying to keep up recording poetry on paper, on vinyl, on videotape.

Suddenly somebody said to me the other day, "Are you getting any dropout from the storage?"

I said, "What dropout? What storage? Don't tell me that now. Let's get it all off tape then. Let's get it over onto disks as soon as we can." Because, you see, poets want to be remembered. In fact, they are desperate about it.

What is a poem anyway that we are going to record it? What is this thing that men do that is so complex and intellectually and emotionally complex that we remember it? Why is poetry memorable? Is a poem the text of the poem? Is the poem the poet's voice reading it? What about his facial expressions? What about his gestures?

What is all this multimedia anyway? The multimedia is an attempt to get live. We want the real thing. We want the real thing, baby. And multimedia gives us more of it than a simple black and white page did. The more the multi in it is multi-faceted like skin pressure, the rhythm of walking, iambic pentameter, all of that combine in the poem. Of course, a good poet organizes every rhythmic beat, every syllable, every rhyme, and makes sure that every one relates to every other one in the text.

How wonderful it would be to have the optical image as well! R.P. Blackmur even wrote a book called LANGUAGE AS GESTURE. He says it is, "The gesture in language." Language actually gestures. I have talked about these problems at over 50 universities and I have bothered television producers and shows all over the country.

I brought along a copy of Volume 1, Issue 3 of PC Magazine. You would think this would have rotted away by this time, but it didn't. There I am revealing the poet's trade, coloring up the text on screen after screen in PC Magazine. That was when Jim Edlin was the editor. You remember him. He wrote the first editorial in PC Magazine written in Issue 1, Volume 1, in which he said, "IBM, The Monochrome Mistake."

When I designed my software, they told me, "It has to run on monochrome. This is, after all, International Business Machines. We are 81/2 X 11, and we are black marks on white paper." IBM has been pulled scratching and screaming into the world of color.

It somehow wants to deny that SMPTE time code for the Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers was out there as a standard ahead of it. You can't make it proprietary. The world is that way. And you can't make the way the world does it proprietary. You have to join the world. You can't beat the world. Keep everything you can proprietary, but join them in their timing standards because SMPTE time code is a timing standard and everyone is going to use it, MIDI included. MIDI has to chase SMPTE time code.

I realized that I was going to get nowhere. I was telling everybody about computing and coloring poetry, and doing video after video, explaining it to everybody across the country, and getting nowhere. They kept saying, "You are a poet, where are your books?"

I said, "Oh, I have got to go back and do books." So I went back and did books. I did one book after another. I did HEART ATTACKS, which had the picture of Frost in it. I did FACE VALUE. I did LIVING PROOF. I did SHOWING MY AGE. I did a whole bunch of books and published them year after year after year. Usually poets wait seven years between books. I just brought them all out. I am, if nothing else, a programmer. So I programmed the first three books to come out red, white and blue, and then I could name the set NEARING THE MILLENNIUM, an American poetry trilogy. And that is what programming is.

Programming is easy. It is just putting things in order, proper words in proper places. A poem is a program, you know. I will show you a little piece on that in a minute.

Then, because I had so many books published, I had just brought out this trilogy when the old Poet Laureate of Florida fell over dead. You know what happens when there is a death in the family. We have to have a newborn. So they called for a product and there were 400 poets nominated from the State of Florida. The Governor and the Secretary of State appointed a panel of critics from outside Florida. The Governor was pleased to announce that the selection was unanimous and I got to be Poet Laureate of Florida for the rest of my life, which means that every lady in the world can come up and ask me to have lunch with her. In some cases, not bad!

Out of the IBM software came Perspectives in Computing, and I was happy to be in there, once again with my color poetry, and this time with individually illuminated text showing rhythm patterns and rhyme schemes within the poems. In other words, poetry was helping me sell my computer message and the computer message was helping me sell my poetic message. Finally, I ended up at the Ford Foundation with the former President of CBS News, Fred Friendly, who was the man you will recall who handled Edward R. Murrow's career.

Fred is a wonderful man. You have seen him on television, I am sure, numerous times on panels talking about the state of the American nation. He was nice enough to sit down and talk with me, and I said, "I want to go somewhere to make a television show and I'm from Florida."

He said, "I don't know that you're a poet yet. Tell me a poem."

I said, "I don't want to waste your time with a poem. How about a line? Is that good enough? I'll tell you a line about a poem named "Treasures" I wrote for my mother: Tears like little bifocals help her read the past."

Fred said, "That's as good as anybody has ever written."

I said before, "That's who I am, Fred."

He said, "You've got to come to my office and talk." So I went to the office and he set me up for that nice piece they made at Jacksonville public television where I turn and come out of the Frost picture. I did a poem about satire and Gulliver's Travels. I am chromo-keyed in, standing on my own face, talking down to my face, which then talked back to me. I was both the little man and the big man at the same time, only to see my video destroyed by the Tidy Bowl man.

My poetry has been about the sciences. Milton chose religion to base his PARADISE LOST on. I chose the sciences to write about. You will find little microwave radiators in my poems; you will find DNA; and you will find people digging up bones. People talk about the arts and sciences as if they were opposites, but they are not. They are the same search for the truth. One simply starts out internally and subjectively, and the other one starts out objectively. We want to know who we are and how we got here. We want to know what this planet is all about. We want to know about the universe. We want to know where it came from and where it's going. We all try to participate in what it feels like to be alive and what it thinks like to be alive.

You make your choice, either the sciences or the arts. People get them mixed up because they do not realize that the technologies come out of the sciences. There is no such thing as computer science. There are the sciences, and out of the sciences come the technologies, and computing is a technology. The same way, out of the arts, come the poems. Poems and technologies, paintings and technologies, those are the fruits of the sciences and the humanities. I like to say that. People oftentimes confuse them. I think they get along well. I know a lot of physicists who play the cello.

I suppose everybody knows that literacy is a spectrum. It is a matter of continuing education. We become more and more literate as we go along in our lives. I don't need to be the one to tell you there is a crisis in American education. I think the Carnegie Foundation has told you. But it's a nation in crisis. I don't mind telling you and reiterating that our schools are in a terrible dilemma.

If we don't do something about it, we will be saying along with Khrushchev, "I guess we didn't want to be a super power." I guess we didn't even want to be a power. I guess we wanted to pay so much attention to private wealth we paid no attention to public wealth and all our bridges fell down and all our schools fell apart. If that happens we are all in deep trouble because you can feel the corrosion getting almost up into the graduate schools now. The graduate schools are still safe but, boy, has everything else gone.

In multimedia you should be very interested in the Chinese. The Chinese give a whole picture in each character, ideograms rather than alphabets. That is something to consider, isn't it? So I guess a couple of people from IBM have to do that as a research project. If we leave Western reading and writing behind in favor of pictures altogether, however, I think we leave behind too much Western thought, too many Western values, and finally Western science and Western civilization.

Already we are under threat from something even more insidious, and that is the fact there are too many of us on the face of the planet. There are so many of us that, just to record the now, the now is expanding so rapidly that history becomes a smaller percentage of it every year. Tradition matters less and last year's rules are outmoded and thrown aside. We will have a real problem then if we don't carry culture with us. Too many good ideas will be laid aside.

The next piece on the video tape is a piece done by a Chyron computer. A Chyron computer is a little digital computer that handles the coloring of text. I asked CBS in Miami if they would do something for me for the educational show that I was going to deliver at the first National Educational Computer Conference. It was done on that little digital Chyron that television stations were using in order to make colored advertisements and colored things about the weather. (The video piece shows the rhyme scheme in matching color pairs in a poem called "The Turtle" by Ogden Nash. It then shows the alliteration in matching colors in the first few lines of Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg address. Skellings narrates the piece and concludes by saying that all good language contains these elements of similar sounds to make it memorable.)

I was invited to be the ballroom speaker the first time they held a National Educational Computer Conference in America. I went out to the University of Iowa in 1979 and told them about how man was digital, how biology was digital, how we could be divided down the center.

We are bilaterally symmetrical animals that actually spin. Jacques Monad, who won the Nobel Prize immediately following Crick and Watson's discovery of the DNA, showed how a two-dimensional protein can create a three-dimensional protein. Didn't you always want to know how you got to be three-dimensional? As an existence, it seems to me that is a real question to ask yourself, isn't it? As soon as you open your eyes, you say, "How did I get to be three-dimensional?" You haven't asked that of yourself?

Warren McCullough, one of the pioneers in your industry, said there are only two questions I am interested in all my life, "What is a number that a man may know it? And what is a man that he may know a number?" I wish Warren were alive. I would say to him, "A man is a number, an infinitely amazing DNA number, some incredible thing that is totally unique, that blows a human being out of an umbilical cord like Robert Frost blows an apple off a tree branch."

Frost says, "Stem end and blossom end." I never knew there was a blossom end of an apple till I read Robert Frost. He told me that an apple is a moment in time, that it is blowing out there like a soap bubble, and so am I.

I was invited to speak to the faculty of The Applied Physics Laboratory at The Johns Hopkins University. I was really impressed by that one. They had Nobel Prize winners on both sides of me in the series. They filmed me, and they sent the color poetry all over the country. Fifteen million high school kids saw it. Then it was on PBS and that was just absolutely wonderful. I mean, I was using the media now, not only for education, but for publication.

Prints of the color poems then went in a traveling exhibit on electric arts, called "ElectroWorks" that was sponsored by The George Eastman House of Kodak.

By that time, however, the Apple computer came along. I wanted one immediately and got an Apple II. I pulled out Wozniak's video chips and put in some decent ones that I got from NASA so that I had what one fellow called my "Stuffed Apple." It had so many boards in it that it barely fit inside the case and it was hardly an Apple II, but it produced broadcast compatible television so that I could record.

Then Chevron Oil reached its Hundredth Anniversary and wanted to hold a celebration of American creativity. Chevron asked prominent people in various parts of the country, like Buckminster Fuller in Washington, DC, and it asked me to lecture to the Miami Museum of Science. We all got up at once and did some of our ideas for television. Then they published little booklets out of it and it was a nice way, I think, for Chevron Oil to celebrate. Miami ABC showed a piece of it.

(The video clip shows Skellings holding a two page ad for Saab in Scientific American magazine. He says: "I would like to thank Scientific American for they gave me my opening tonight. A two page ad appeared in Scientific American. A car for the left side of your brain. All text. All text. A car for the right side of your brain. A big color picture. Text, picture. Left side, right side. Saab, the most intelligent car ever built. Why are they doing that? Why are they talking left side in text, pictorially right side? Because, of course, that's the way our brain functions. Tonight, at this very moment, under a full moon, the man whose work I have based my work on, Roger Sperry of Cal Tech, is receiving the Nobel Prize in Sweden for his work on left and right side of the brain. Can you imagine how delighted I am since I risked my all on his theories? I said somehow if I could get linear sequential, step by step, one, two, three, four, left side of the brain and colors and pattern of the right side of the brain, both appearing simultaneously on a computer screen, perhaps I could stimulate in those who saw the poetry that condition that Dr. Bogen the brain researcher calls creativity. For when both the left and right side of the brain are firing together, the person is the most creative. And so I decided to try to see if I could get my poetry off the black and white of the page and into color. (Skellings reads from his Creativity speech.)

When I first met Don Estridge, he asked me, "What do you see?"

I answered, "I see networks of all our universities with poets sending their poems and fiction writers sending their short stories around. I want to read the poem that is being written today, not wait two years for some New York publisher to get around to putting it out on black and white paper. Why can't I have a repository of material?"

I talked to Don Estridge about starting a National Magnetic Poetry Archive. That's one thing he decided not to fund.

I have just founded this past year, with IBM's beneficence, a Florida Writers Network. IBM gave me a grant of machines for Florida State University, University of Central Florida, and Florida International University so that their creative writers workshops can start to send materials back and forth over what Florida calls the Florida Information Resource Network.

We've gone about an hour now and I'm going to do some more and I want to tell you more, but I thought perhaps you had saved up some questions and you are going to forget them by the time we get there. Would you like a little question and answer period now? If you would, say so. If you don't, I will continue to charge on till we are done. Just tell me. Have you got any questions? Please.

Q: Yes, Dr. Skellings, would you address the copyright issue that you foresee. If you go to a New York publisher, obviously the poet can have his material published and get paid for that, but what about if there's all this exchange of information. How is that going to be handled in the future?

Ed: A terrifying prospect, isn't it? One professor said to me, "They'll publish my notes and I'll be all done." You get a glimpse into the academic world. He lives by that one set of notes that he does each semester. How fascinating! I don't know how you handle it. Maybe like CompuServe does by access. Maybe you share the time. Maybe you will count the time people are on-line looking at your sonnet. That's probably for other people than me. I suppose the lawyers will decide all that. How does ASCAP do it now with songs? Every time they are played, one cent goes somehow into a great 3090 in the sky that sends out the right amount check.

I can tell you one thing. I am 60 years old now and I am looking at the last part. What did I do? I did these poems. I tried to tell people some things about the future. I tried to move them forward, at least a generation. Not a bad expenditure! I guess who does the accounting will do the accounting. I am a firm believer in DO IT FIRST and the accountants will come along. You know what I mean! If we waited till all of the forms were out and all the paper was filled out, American civilization would collapse of their weight. I don't know.

You raise a remarkable point. There are people who say information itself ought to be free. I know you've heard that. It rumbles in the background like a growing dark cloud on large company's horizons. What do you mean information ought to be free? We've been charging people to get to it. In the university, we are no different. If you want to know this, you sit there three hours a week for so many weeks. I earn my vacation and my tenure and I dole out this information to you. I will see you next time until eventually you've got enough accrued so I'll give you what's called a credit. Did it ever occur to you that all those credits have gone into the same place in Heaven where they kept all your demerits from the Boy Scouts? In my last five universities nobody ever asked to see my credentials. Can you imagine that? I could be a total impostor! I mean, we have had them operating on people's brains, and I'm in a less risky occupation than that. People pull it off.

Q: I've heard it said that television and multimedia replace the imagination of the people that used

to read text. How do you feel about that?

Ed: Well, obviously I don't think that's so. We will start there. Pornography hasn't replaced sex!

Do you see how good I am at 60! Thank you.

Q: One of the clear things, at least to me and I think the audience, that you're bringing forth here is we're trying to get audio and visual, just basic stuff. But the thing that you're bringing out here is the extra dimension of emotion in all those things. Eventually, once we get through this basic stuff, we're kind of in the binary stage here, then we have to get this extra dimension of emotion and all the other things that really convey so much information. It's a whole new world.

Ed: Exactly. You see, IBM must ask itself the following question: Is multimedia, and all this business and all this attention and all this interest in it, simply because we brought television to the computer screen? Is that all it really is? Or are we saying something entirely different? Are we saying that now there's something other than TV. There's video. And video is not TV. TV is over there and has to do with sitcoms, but video is going to expand. In fact, the number of different videos one will be attending to is going to change. To get to the emotion, you have to come to terms with the content.

When I got the opportunity to do the materials for IBM, ELECTRIC POET, COMMA CAT, DICTIONARY DOG, I went out and hired three PhD's. I put them in a room and said, "Here's the total outline of what I want. I've done all of it for you. Here, just go ahead." At the end of three months I went in and looked at their work, and it was absolutely terrible. These were intelligent men. They did not know how to format visually. They had never produced any audio visual materials. Audio visual production requires a team of people working together in harmony to produce anything, all checking and counter checking each other's work. You can't simply say we will do a little demo of it and we will let the teachers do it. The teachers don't have time to do it. The teachers don't have time to work with ELECTRIC POET to produce anything of value. They can only do a little quick demo of their own.

Last year I was an IBM Consulting Scholar. I talked to the other consulting scholars. They said, "They're using us as demos." The linguist amongst the consulting scholars has a wonderful way of handling an intelligent database to bring French idiom in for translation. It is absolutely wonderful. All they want is the first five minutes because they want to use it to market other people, to do other things, and I am saying to Marketing, "When will we have fooled enough of them? When can we really start to use them? When will they stop stealing my time? When will OS/2 stop expanding?"

I said to Don Estridge, "Near NTSC." NTSC being the television standard.

And he complained, "Yes, near NTSC." We got near it, but not NTSC so therefore you can't record the early PC's. You just can't record them. You are near it, not near enough, but close to it. An Amiga gives you that output, if I am not saying a curse word.

Maybe that is the beginning of wisdom to say I don't know what I'm dealing with here and it looks bigger and more multifaceted tomorrow than it does today. I have a personal computer that runs at 80 MIPS and it runs Wavefront and Alias. I'm into the 3D letters now. These days I'm working with P's that are solid and they turn around. The blue falls out with chromo-key and you look at the P and there's Peter and Piper there.

I want to make some videotapes of these last couple years of my life to really shock everybody and return interest to the text. I've got a video generation of kids out there I want to reinterest in text. I want to show them how fascinating text can be. If given enough MIPS, maybe I can do it.

Q: You talked about arts and sciences going together well and I was just wondering whether you would comment about using that to stimulate creativity in IBM. How can a program become a creative expression of an individual?

Ed: There's a lady who did a popular book called DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN. She does a whole series of seminars and I've found IBM has used her. She is very good and it works. All I am telling you is that linear sequential is a left hemisphere processing task. Roger Sperry's work, by the way, was on split brain patients. I mean we can look forward now coming back from the Gulf to a lot more split brain people so we'll get more scientific knowledge. I'm sorry! I was looking at CNN like you are with fright, terror and tears. I thought after the one I was in and the Vietnam one, they would have sense enough not to go do another one, but we're going to do another one. There is no way out of it, apparently, and there we are. And, you know, I remember being one of those boys that got supported.

Can I have the next video please? I'll talk to you later about that. (The video shows how the Electric Poet program uses color to teach poetry. It is called POETRY IN MOTION) Can you imagine what this last couple of weeks has been for me going back and seeing these tapes for the first time and pulling pieces out and saying oh my! It has been like a personal retrospective. I can imagine what painters go through when they tell painters they are going to have a retrospective. They look at that early work, can't remember what they were doing.

What I want to do is jump immediately into the RGB, right, and we'll show the Kentucky piece. (It is from a computer demonstration Skellings made for an IBM Seminar held at the University of Kentucky for Liberal Arts Deans.) I want to do that right away. Unfortunately we have to convert this from the red green blue of the computer screen. As many of you know, RGB ain't NTSC. NTSC is Never The Same Color Twice. There are the cheap Japanese sets that you always have to adjust in the Holiday Inn and say, "Was somebody actually looking at magenta and green people? How could they watch the news that way?" Anyway, this is RGB, but it has to be for these purposes converted into NTSC. I hope it turns out to be good enough for our show.

IBM invited two hundred Deans of Arts and Letters from around the country to gather last year at the University of Kentucky, and there I spoke about this and I thought I should show you these few scenes and slides. (The first slide appears.) You'll notice that this shows you common English measure. Common English measure is an idealization of our unaccented and accented syllables in English. You know what iambics are_ta tum, ta tum, ta tum, ta tum. If you do it four in a line and you do four lines of it, you have tetrameter quatrain and you have all heard that way back in school. What it means simply is you have four beats per line. You have four unstressed syllables and four stressed syllables and you can see that we've pulled them out in the bottom to show you the colors of each.

Go to the next one. I'll try to do this poem for you. This is by Robert Browning, "Meeting at Night." (Skellings recites the poem). Well, when Browning wrote that, he did a pair of poems. This first one is at night about a man going to meet his lover. Let's look at the next slide. It is putting in the metrical accent of all of the stressed syllables. You'll notice that if any substitutions have been made in the ideal pattern, it has been to put in more stressed syllables so that they come in threes. "Two hearts beat" is a good example. "Warm sea scented." All the stress of a man going to his lover.

Do the next slide. I call them parenthetical rhyme. The first and last rhyme of the first stanza, then the next two inside them, and then the next two inside them. If you look at the next stanza, you'll see the outer lines rhyme, then the inner ones, then the inner ones again, same poem. Next slide, alliterative pairs. All kinds of pairing all the way through it in order to stress even more. Go ahead to the next slide, consonance pairs. All kinds of little consonance pairs trickle through this poem. I think the nicest ones are the t's and p's as a tap at the pane. Isn't that great?

What I am trying to say to you is that a poem is as carefully programmed by the poet as any computer program can be. Go on to the next slide. Rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration are recurring, recursive movements. Next slide, and this is the nice but, and it's a big but. I decided to do a big but and animate it a little bit. The logic of a poem, the way a poem moves, is associational. It is contextual. It is recursive.

(The next slide is shown). This is called "Parting At Morning". (Skellings recites Browning's poem, the second in the pair.) You noticed what happened? There are no more crowded accents together. Everything is anapestic. There are more unaccented syllables now. Everything is relaxed. "Round the cape, of a sudden came, and the need of a world." Little unstressed syllables going in. Notice, however, that the rhyme pairs are the outer two and the inner two. (Next slide) Now let's move them around. I've taken the two poems and put one on top of the other. We'll pull the rhymes out to the side, then we'll erase the text and move these together so that you can see that both "Meeting At Night" and "Parting At Morning" have the same rhyme, pattern of idea, pattern of sound. I hope this shows you a little something about poetry that maybe you didn't know or saw a different way.

It seems to me that we mistake two kinds of time. We mistake compositional time from performance time. Compositional time is where the man beats his head over the computer program or the poem or the concerto or whatever intellectual work he is doing. It may take him a year to produce that which is used up in one minute of performance time. As people have told you over and over, it takes a tremendous production to make one hour of video entertainment for you. Sometime somebody is going to have to understand that. In our production of educational materials, we can't just crank them out and expect kids who watch excellent production on MTV and watch the ideas. The visual ideas come this fast. We can't slow our educational material down to the slowest any more. We have got to have variable time built into our multimedia. It is going to have to adjust itself even if it has to read the students' input. We have got to start adjusting for the differentials in timing. We are boring our best students and we are flabbergasting our dullest.

(Skellings demonstrates an Ensoniq Performance Sampler while Skellings' assistant, Diane, demonstrates audio sequencer software on a PC.) Since I was interested in the vocal and sonic image as well as the video image of things, I immediately moved to sampling devices when they became available. A sampling device simply means it is going to take my utterance into a microphone. It is going to digitize it and store it for me in ways I want. So, I can take a glass and go ding with a hammer and put that in middle C, and make my keyboard because this is another kind of keyboard.

People at IBM used to say, "Developing keyboard skills." I wonder what keyboard they're talking about. Bukla's new keyboard fits both hands this way. It isn't organized in the 8's like this one. It goes this way and has little buttons on top of it. Have you seen that input device yet? What an amazing thing!

I can put a chord here, a chord here, one here, one here, I can invert the chords one side to the other. Amazing stuff! This is just a stock old Ensoniq computer. An Ensoniq computer has little floppies and it allows me to be musical.

I went out to Texas where all good things come from and I downloaded myself a piece from Liszt. Now the Liszt I downloaded, a little piano piece, doesn't have any content in it. It's just MIDI. It is just notes. The notes don't know what they want to be yet. They are empty. They are not either a saxophone or a piano or anything else. I'm going to make them into a piano. Diane will play the piano for you by hitting one of the notes with her mouse. I can, of course, do the same thing over here with a different key. Not only can I operate this as a grand piano, but Diane can bring in Liszt and not only play one note at it with a mouse, and understand she can edit, play it faster than any human. (The Liszt piece of programmed music is played) Who can play that perfectly? And on top of that, they even have an algorithm that puts human imperfection into it. I think that's the crowning stroke when it actually makes perfect human error. Those of you who can see the screen, can see the notes going across it. One of the advantages of this is, not only can you shut it off, but you can make Liszt play glass bells or, if you have a flair for it, both at the same time. Beautiful, isn't it? You can hardly turn it off. I've heard this about ten thousand times. It's so good! There are a lot of other things we can do with it. Thank you, Diane. And thank you, Allen, (the engineer) for carrying the machine all the way just to do that.

But I am a poet and I don't want to ever stop there. Everybody is always happy to stop there. People have been telling me that all my life you ought to stop there. Why not just a little bit further? If it will play that, why shouldn't I be able to say the into the machine and put the in middle C and why can't I say whose woods. Isn't it great for Robert Frost to come back? You can't escape from the tradition. I am going to Robert Frost you to death until you go back and get your copy of Robert Frost, pull it down, and say, "Whose woods these are I think I know," etc. (Skellings recites "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost.)

I suggest that a good way to take the emotion out of it is to say, "And kilometers to go before I sleep." Some things shouldn't be messed with. (Skellings depresses keys on the Ensoniq Performance Sampler and it plays some words Skellings sampled in his own voice from Frost's poem:

"Whose woods these are I think I know/ His house is in the village though.") Do you realize I can play Robert Frost out of syntactical order? I can start to really stress whose house and whose woods these are, which is really what Robert Frost is saying. Is it the man who owns the deed to this thing or is it me that feels the call of it and the emotional pull of it? Which? Who has ever owned the woods? That's what the Indian would ask. But I think that's fantastic. (Skellings continues to play the poem.) I think I know. I think you do too, Robert. I think I know his woods. I think I know his house. I think I know here. You see, Robert Frost knows here, he knows his woods and he knows his house better than the man that owns them. Robert Frost is questioning the very nature of possession, of who possesses what. Do the woods possess him? Does some man possess these woods? Does he possess the woods for a moment? How interesting all these things are when digital technology makes you begin to confront them. That's really what I'm here to say to you.

We can use the atomic bomb for peaceful purposes. We can use multimedia for all sorts of great stuff or we could fall right on our face with this last possibility for education. Because I'm afraid that I agree with the Carnegie Foundation, if we don't do something about it, we're in deep trouble. That is the second time I've said it to you and that ought to be enough for an audience as absolutely immediately intelligent as this one.

I have never found a company who has such a standard of highly educated and intelligent and affable people. The outside world, you know, looks on this culture as too rigid, too stiff. I haven't found it to be that way. I have been fortunate in being able to maintain a position outside the company and also have great good friends inside it. Perhaps I can say it to you when even you can't tell each other that. But, it's probably the only company that has enough cash left to do something about the problems in American education. And I would say to you, if I can say it before I retire from the stage, you'd better get your assets in shape.

(Skellings holds up a book.) This is a book called THE SAMPLING BOOK. It seems to me you ought to have this in your library. This is about synthesizers and computers. It ought to be around somewhere. One of the reasons I recommend these everywhere I go is not only is it a good introduction to the musical electronic side of it, but THE SAMPLING BOOK has some excellent philosophy up front. It says that when we take out a video camera, we are sampling imagery at a rate. When we take out our 35 mm camera, we are sampling reality. What we are attempting to do is capture reality somehow. If multimedia does that for us and we can communicate our several realities, one to the other, we are going to be in a lot better shape and we maybe can save education along the route.

Having gone for the two hours I've allotted, I am trying to save enough time for questions. Is there anything that I have now neglected to show, do, tell. We'll skip Animator from here. Go buy 3D Studio from Autodesk on your own. It is a new entry into the low-end field for PC's. I prefer Unix and multitasking machines and Wavefront and Alias because I think they will be coming down to the PC level soon.

The one mistake I don't want to make any more is underestimating the speed of development within the industry. I have been making it all my life. I've said well, it will take them two years for that and it arrives next month and I just don't want to do that any more. I want to show you this piece of 3D animation and then open it up for questions. I hope you enjoy this one. This is Wavefront and Alias and it's the best of all of these people, and I edited this so you can blame me for it. I went around the country and I downloaded and asked for tapes and begged people all over the place from Canada and the U.S. to send me the best 3D they had done. I got all that 3D, four and a half hours, and edited it down to eight minutes. I am going to show you an eight minute poem of three-dimensional computing that exists only in computer's minds. (Skellings shows the tape.)

That's what one poet can do and has done with his days. I intend to continue doing it down in Fort Lauderdale in the University Tower. I hope some of the ideas are useful to you. I don't think we can rest until every student and every teacher in the country is able to do that at the desktop. Now I will try to entertain any questions that are left over or new ones, or whatever.

Q: Do you see the emergence of collaborative or cooperative art in all this computer animation as

being something that is good or just another type of art?

Ed: A poet, of course, works by himself. What we know about groups is usually a dominant figure emerges in every group who then makes the others in the group do all the work. The same thing is true of artists and other groups. If you want to look now at the Iowa Print Group, there is an association of artists and each one teach one every day. It seems to me that's a different story. I think different kinds of people ought to get together to do projects, people who have different parts of a project to do and are talented at a certain part of it. I think it does all of them good to be exposed to each other's stuff. But collaborative art, to have like five guys do a painting, almost always fails. On the other hand, if they want to, why shouldn't they?

Q: But, don't you lose that edge? Don't you lose the focus?

Ed: I lose the idea of a person talking to another person. I was over in London when I went over on some London patent work, and I was just about done with the British seascapes. I know they love the sea, and they're an island and all that, but you can just enshrine so many pictures of boats and waves. Finally I am coming out of the National Gallery, I'd been there a couple of hours and can't stand it any more. Give me some air. I'm heading out and a painting caught my eye, in the corner. I wonder what that is? This little flash! I turned and went to the painting and it was a chair. Van Gogh had painted his own chair. I stood there for two hours with my mouth open with the drool running down my chest. Look at that! But Van Gogh can do that to you, one man making a human personal statement. An assertion of everything about himself is in that chair.

I came back home, and for two years I thought about that chair. I'd dream about it at night. I tried to write poems to the chair. Nothing worked. I couldn't get even line one and it was an emotional experience. Who stands there two hours and then takes a cab back from the hotel the next morning to stand there two more hours in front of one painting? Not me. I am a red blooded American boy. You don't catch me hanging around paintings. Four hours! One painting! It's that good!

You can discover a lot of things about yourself if you just stand in front of a Van Gogh awhile. He'll lead you to do that. It's that around the neck kind of thing. A German poet said you see the headless torso of Apollo and your imagination creates the head and you must change your life. If you are not open enough as a human being, if you die without having been open enough to art to have it get inside you and just take you apart, then you've missed something. You are cheating yourself out of an experience. Well, that is not my subject, but I have the book, LIVING PROOF, and I'll do the poem for you that I finally got out of that painting. I never thought that painting would come up again. It's called "Vincent, Vincent". (Skellings recites the poem.)

That's what you're talking about. And I don't know how one group can talk to another group. We are so bad when groups try to talk to groups aren't we? It's horrifying. It is bad enough, person to person. Send a group over there to talk to those guys and they will come back with a war.

Q: What do you view as some of the pressure points or the secrets for us to bring technology into education in order to solve this problem? There's such a pushback, it seems. You have a wealth of experience.

Ed: Yes. I've got a wealth of experience and all of it's failure in that regard. I wish I had a couple of straws of hope. I think it is safe to say that after 40 years of having colleges of education within universities, that we've absolutely failed in that regard. We've let methods take over. It's methods of teaching, rather than substance. I don't know what to say at this point. I'm a friend of the Secretary of Education and I don't know what to say to the Secretary of Education.

The Secretary of State says to me, "What will we do in Florida about our libraries? How are we going to get our State libraries buying the same books that our universities and our community colleges? We have all different librarians and nobody knows where the books are and it costs more to transport the books around. What are we going to do now? Here come the librarians who are dealing with stacks and stacks of CD ROM. And that's the big problem. How do we get the students in touch? You know the old saw about the president and the librarian. They meet one another during Christmas vacation. They're going across through the snow on the path and the president says to the librarian, "Hi. How are things at the library?"

Like all good librarians he says, "I'll tell you how they are. Things are perfect at the library. There is only one book out and I am going to get it right now." That's the usual librarian mentality. That old joke is so good. I savor it. We've got librarians now who have their arms around the CD ROMs. We've got the best collection of CD ROMs in the State. Only you can't access them. Can we come in? No. You can't come in here at all. We don't want to network ours. We've got them all now.

Now the other thing that scares you is Virginia Tech just overhauled its whole campus. You should look to Virginia Tech. With its setup, it gave all the students access, and what shocked everybody is in the first week there was 30 full bulletin boards up and running and students talking to one another. Say about what? It was private. Obviously, you don't read other people's mail. The point is there was that much communication going on. The students were creating something new that nobody ever thought would happen. So, as soon as you give them all the computing power they take over and they run it in ways you never imagined.

Boy, you give them multimedia and you say well, we are going to hypercard them to death. They'll go from that button to there and then the teacher will lead them from that place to there. And then they'll read the critics. No, they won't read the critics. They'll say the critics can go somewhere else. What we want them to do is explore, though. We want to put all knowledge digitized, all imagery digitized. Let everybody have it. Make it cheap, not totally without value, because I'd like my Social Security to hold up, too.

Q: You strike me as a person who has pioneered against user hostility in computers, and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on interface paradigms that we currently have and what you'd like to see?

Ed: I don't know what to do about those people who are so hostile. I think it is because they think it has something to do with math. I'll bet if you scratch somebody who is computer hostile you'd find out they were also math fearful. And they are also very defensive people, because they think a computer is some kind of intelligence test. If it were any kind of intelligence test, half of us in this room would have failed. At least, all of Marketing would have. All right! All right! A cheap shot by the man who had the microphone! I think it has to do with math fear and I think it's closely related.

One of the tricks I use is to go directly to the man who invented the modern electrical computer and it's John Von Neumann. And I say John Von Neumann did not call it a computer. Don't be scared by IBM and the banks. IBM and the banks are bad people. You listen to me now. Computers really aren't computers. There's no math in the box. There's nothing there but little electrical currents running around. In fact, there isn't any math, is there? So I'm not lying to them. All it does is add fast and calls it multiplication. I know what it's doing. Anyway, the other thing I tell them is that when John Von Neumann invented the modern computer, he called it the Universal Symbol Manipulator and that is closer, I think, to what it really is than calling it a computer.

I don't know how we get away with it now. You know QWERTYUIOP is going to be across the keyboard forever. It doesn't matter whether the keys are in that arrangement because they used to jam so we separated out the keys used most where fast typists wouldn't jam the keys. Now we're all stuck with that keyboard, unless you have a keyboard that you want to retrain to your own. Tektronix was nice enough to give me their first colored computer for a few months. I was playing around with it until I discovered the "Learn" key, and I learned one key to know the other one to be a T and I made a P a T, and I got so lost in levels because it went 24 bits down, 24 levels of keyboards within its keyboard. And I said, "Oh, I'm gone."

You do that to a poet and it's like a canary in a mine. The answer is if you approach people saying to them don't worry about the math, there isn't any in it. And you try to make that machine into what it really is. I also have found it helpful to take it apart for them. I am one of those people who tears floppy disks apart to show them what's inside. Say look, it is just rust! It's rust on mylar film. It's like the stuff on your windows in your car, and it's got rust on it. They've polished down. You can do a little recording with it like Frank Sinatra.

If you try to bring it into metaphors they understand, I think you can sometimes get past that hostility. I have no idea, and that lady visits me in my dreams from Tampa though, I mean the one who came up and said that I ought to be ashamed of myself. Computers and poetry! She was livid! I mean there was so much anger.

Q: You said you had some conversations with Don Estridge. It must have been almost a decade ago, and the result of that was the Electric Poet. If you were to talk to him today and he would ask you, what do you think?

Ed: I would say, "Don't get on the plane."

Q: What would you tell him as far as how you told us we should get our assets in gear in order to help the education? What kind of applications do you foresee?

Ed: Number one, don't do what your big competitor that made cybers, Control Data, don't do anything like they did. They had a chairman named Norris who was an absolutely brilliant man and everything he said fell like jewels and we all read and said, "Wow, Wow! What an industry!" And then his vice presidents all went out and defeated him. They didn't do anything. Nobody ever did anything Norris told them to. So, don't do that.

I just heard your chairman. I was this far away from John Akers and he said, "What has to be done in education?" and this was televised worldwide, this talk of his, and he said, "What must be done is systemic change in education. Systemic change." If we change this over here, we're in pretty good shape except for these five things. No, systemic change. We have to sort of restructure education.

It is my belief, and this is only one guy, but I'm saying only the microcomputer can do it. We have teachers that are overwhelmed with a number of roles they have to play. They have to be confidante, they have to be motivator, they have to be blow the nose here, they have to worry about nutrition and home. They have so many things to do and we give them instruction on top of it and that's where they really fail. They fail in the delivery of the materials.

In the beginning, when IBM first went into the education market (the education market, do you like that), it said, "We want to enhance. We're not here to replace. We won't scare the teachers this way." The teachers saw right through you. They're sharp. They're smart. They know when they're going to be replaced. They didn't want you to enhance them out of existence. What I think you have to say to the teacher is, "We're going to do the information work for you because the computers don't make errors. We're going to amass teachers together to do whole curricula well, excellently, the best we can do at the top of our brains on a machine that's a little more advanced than you're using now, one definitely that is networked."

Because a little machine can't know the answers that a child might want to know and that machine ought to be dialing out for the answer. If it doesn't have to dial out for the answer, it ought to be solving the problem locally, like Ronald Reagan says we ought to. Solve it locally. It gets expensive the further you go. It gets more expensive. But we've got to give them that output. We've got to connect the network inside the school, the logical token ring I'm talking about.

I ought to know this. I just put in 120 token rings in this State. I linked 120 cities into the Legislature. That's my model running there, 1,500 PC's all answering each other's phones. Good system. Runs fine. You ought to do that in the schools. We ought to link them all up. Do it as a test. Do it in Florida. Let me design it. I'll help. I'll do it for nothing. Let's do it!

I've got one minute left. I should end with, "Just do it!" That's a slogan. I'll charge them. Who are they? Sony? Nike? Nike! "Just do it!" Just do it and the paperwork will catch up with us. We can afford it now. Next year, when they really show us the balance sheet, we won't be able to afford it. We probably won't be able to afford anything next year. But we can do it now. And you guys are--

what a hot center! You're all interested in multimedia. Refuse to leave this room! Form committees!

There he is, the poor guy who invited me. I'm sorry I've been so subversive, Scott. But, bye bye.

I'll see you in the other room.

(Editor's note: Seven years later, you are seeing this speech on the Internet.)