I'm Rex, and this is Alexandra. She's the press person, and I'm the office manager.

What is Voyager all about?

Alexandra: It's really too big to define quickly.

Rex: I think it's pretty simple. It's about creating software that is --

A: No no, it's far beyond that. You're entirely wrong! [Laughs]

R: I thought it was about creating software that's useful and educational and interesting.

A: No. It's about creating a future, not about creating just software. It's something much larger than that.

Is there a company philosophy?

A: There's not one in a few words, but yes, there is something that holds us all together.

R: There's an attitude but not a philosophy.

What is that attitude?

A: Give and you will receive. That's what it is.

R: We're cutting-edge so we can do whatever we want to. That's what it is.

What are your favorite Voyager products?

R: A World Alive.

A: Mine is Marvin MInsky's Society of Mind.

Have you seen Blam!?

A: Not yet. I've heard it's incredible, though.

R: I've seen it. Very cool.

How did you guys get into this field?

A: Well, I was a Japanese chef before, and the transition into multimedia from cooking Japanese food is a natural one. I mean, you have everything there that you have in multimedia, except there's this technology thing. [Laughs]

R: I was a sound designer before, and I figured that this is an entry-level position, and maybe I'll sound design here. Actually I was an NYU student.

What is in the future for Voyager?

A: It's really too big to tell right now. Things are moving very rapidly; we'll have to see.

Are you going to stay in CD-ROMs, or move into other media?

A: We don't hold ourselves back. If the platform that everyone uses becomes something else, we'll transfer our stuff to that. CD-ROMs are just a very popular platform right now, and it's very importnat to us that our stuff gets out there. It's not just for people who can afford one drive or have one kind of machine; it's very important that everyone gets this. If everyone starts to buy 3D0 machines, that's what we want our stuff on. Not necessarily because we can sell more, but because we want everyone to see this stuff.

What is the point of this whole open house?

R: To meet new people, show off what we're doing, before it's done.

A: Because a lot of people call all the time and they have questions like, "What is multimedia?" "What does Voyager do?" They don't really understand. We're insanely busy here because we're doing too much. So what we said is, "We'll have an open house once a month, or once every two months, and we invite everyone here.

Is it a success?

A: As long as people are enjoying themselves and learning something, I think so. And it looks that way.

I'm Diana Thompson

And what is your connection with Voyager?

I'm a former schoolteacher. I used to teach first and second graders, and kindergarten students. And I thought their products would be great for that age level -- introducing them to music and literature. And I plan to write to them and give them proposals. One would be for a history of dance. Right now they have a history of music, a partial history, and that was fantastic. I noticed it here at the open house.

You're applying for a job here.

Yes. I would love to work with new product development, or marketing and publicity and public relations. And help them to reach other markets than they have already.

Why Voyager?

Voyager has put their name where other people like myself can notice them. They presented a lecture and demonstration at CUNY recently, for Black Women in Publishing, which is an organization I am affiliated with. That's how I first heard about them. I haven't heard about any other organization. I don't know about their competition, but I know about Voyager.

Which Voyager products do you like?

They have information about the history of music, including Bach and Gregorian chants -- where the name Gregorian comes from. They have work about several African American authors, and a little bit of the history of this country. There is so much that they can do, and so much that they have to offer, and I would like to help them do that.

What do you like about the new media?

It's convenient, it's small, it's compact. You can carry it with you. You can use it just by pressing a button, and I think that people who are physically challenged will accept it, because it's audio and visual.

And you want to use it in educational contexts.

Yes. Also for personal use. If I have an interest in going to see a certain ballet or a certain orchestra, I can prepare myself before I hear their works. I can use the materials from Voyager and make myself an educated consumer of music, and find out what Stravinsky was doing with other art forms besides music in his lifetime -- what influenced him, before I go to see his work at Lincoln Center or somewhere else.

What's so great about Voyager?

N: They are at the pinnacle of two industries -- the publishing industry and the computer industry, and Bob and his team have a vision that very few other people in the world have right now. He's on the front end of something great and exciting

RA: Really smart people work here, and they read a lot

A: Look around.

What are your favorite products?

JH : I think Maus might be a new favorite, but Exotic Japan is still among the best things they ever did. Mabeth is pretty good. Beethoven is incredible.

Have you seen Blam!?

A: I've seen it. I think it's fabulous. I think it's, graphically, not like anything I've ever seen on a computer, that's for sure.

What do you do here?

A: I am a freelance Voyager author and writer, and a friend of Bob's. I wrote a quotation book called And I Quote, which is going to be an Expanded Book. And I'm working on the CD-ROM of Who Invented the Personal Computer?

Judith Seidel.

What's your connection with Voyager?

I know Bob Stein and his friend Ashton, and I teach computers.

What do you like about Voyager?

The products have a little more depth than comparable ones. If you look at a lot of the CDs that are around now, they're not connected to the world of ideas and books as closely as the Voyager products.

What are your favorites?

Who Built America, and A Hard Day's Night. But I haven't seen everything, so I'm not a really comprehensive judge.

How do you like the Marvin Minsky one here?

So far I like it, but I'm a little disappointed, because I thought that some of the phrases or ideas would be linked to other kinds of information, and so far I'm reading it as I would read a book.

You teach computers. Why multimedia? Why CD-ROMs? What's so great about it?

It's not always appropriate. I mean, I think there is a lot you can do with computers short of CD-ROMs. Certainly, word processing has changed the whole way we write. But in terms of using technoloby as a resource to learn content, CD-ROM is the way to go, not just as a tool for our own work. But if we want to increase our access to information, we're much better using a CD-ROM than we are piles and piles of the New York Times, or whatever else accumulates around our houses. The main reason I want CD-ROMs is so my husband will throw out the old New York Times' in our house.

What do you think about the "information superhighway"?

I think it's just fine. I don't use Internet right now, but I'm planning on getting involved with it, because I'm the computer coordinator at the Brearly School, and we're going to have accounts for our students, and they'll be able to use Internet to access libraries and other places. I can't really make an accurate judgement on the information superhighway until I'm driving on it myself.

What kind of computers do you use now?

Macintosh.

As a computer teacher, what do you see in the future that you like?

I'm very enamored with image processing -- the ability to take a photograph and change it. It has all kinds of other implications. I'm particularly interested in getting girls interested in computers, and I'd like to do that via computer graphics and animation.

Are kids going to grow up wired to computers?

I certainly hope not. I teach at an all-girls school now, and I'm finding that I have a way to go with some of them, and I would like to start using more complex applications. I think that the public school system is a shambles with respect to computer education, and I think we've got to do something about the way students learn technology in the public school system.

Like what?

Train teachers to use technology, keep pace, so we're at least two years behind the industry, instead of ten years!

Have you heard of the Edison Project? What do you think?

I believe in public education. I don't feel comfortable with the Edison Project for that reason. And I also think the idea, in the Edison Project, that you can have fewer teachers if you use technology is ridiculous. If you use technology, usually you need more teachers. If you've ever gone into a computer room where students are doing something active, and they're actually learning something, there aren't fewer teachers, there are more. Technology doesn't eliminate the need for teachers. The Edison Project maintains that if we had more technology in schools, we can economize by having a different student-teacher ratio -- 30 to 1, instead of 20 to 1. I don't agree with that.

Don't computers make learning more individualized?

It doesn't have to be. If you're writing a grant proposal with a bunch of people, you can collaborate more easily around a computer. So it depends what you're doing. In some cases, yeah. You can track learning to the answer. I mean, they have labs in New York City where students do workbooks on the computer; they're completely individualized. I'm not sure that's good. I think that's just taking old-fashioned education, and making it more quantitative. It's not necessarily deepening it, and allowing students to collaborate or learn more creatively.

What do you like most about working with Minsky and Gould?

They're both really funny, and they're really into it. They're very different from eachother. Minsky knows so much about computers, and he's got all these ideas about things that we could do, if only we had $10 million. And Gould doesn't know anything about computers, and he's amazed that you can do anything with them. So it's kind of a nice spectrum.

Tell me about the MInsky project.

Well, both of them are kind of monuments to the life work of these people -- that's what the whole series is about. The Minsky one features a lot of original video that we shot of him, explaining different concepts in AI, and the history of AI. It's great.

How about Stephen Jay Gould?

Gould is a little different. He wasn't into doing so much question and answer, he wanted to do a straight lecture. So it's more of a straight lecture -- an overview of Darwin and evolution. And it's got a lot of his writings, with illustrations, and a lot of Darwin's works. The main thing in Gould is the way you can navigate through the information, to follow different themes on the topic of natural history and evolution.

What do you like about Voyager?

Voyager is great. It's a great place to work, it's really fun, everyone is reallly nice. They serve you dinner if you stay late, to encourage you to do so. And everyone is really smart.

Is there a company philosophy?

Um... Robbie, is there a company philosophy? This is Robbie Mays, she's our art director.

RM: Voyager tends to be very culturally oriented, always involved in the arts in some way. Content is very crucial.

What do you like most about working here?

RM: The people. Highly intelligent, very bright people.

What projects have you worked on?

RM: I'm the art director, I preside over, from the art standpoint, almost everything.

As people working in new media, what do you see in the future that is really exciting?

MM: Chaos.

RM: Chaos. And the streamlining of chaos into form, and function.

My name is Ben. Ben X. [pictured, right]

Ben X, what do you do?

I'm unemployed.

What are you doing here?

I'm just chillin', willin', and illin'.

What's with the video camera?

It's my villain.

What's with all this technology? What's the deal?

I'm in favor of it, man, it's breaking down barriers, chopping down walls, making things happen.

Tell me about your show.

We like to rock. The name of my show is Slammage Report. And we like to rock.

It's on public access, cable?

We're working with that.

When? What time?

Soon. Coming soon to a public access television network near you.

Elizabeth Scarborough.

What do you do here?

I'm a software producer. I'm working on a project with Art Speigelman, Maus.

How is it going?

It's a month away from being done, and we're in the final push. It's going to be very wonderful.

What do you like most about Voyager?

That I get to work with Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, and make amazing products.

Is there a philosophy or an attitude that is central to Voyager?

There is a real sense of independence. If you want to do something, and you really care about it, you could make it happen. Sometimes that works against you, if you're not highly motivated. But if you really want to do something... it's a real empowering feeling.

What's so great about these new, interactive technologies?

Well, take the program that I'm working on, Maus. It was a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, and the author worked for 14 or 15 years on it. He went to Auschwitz and visited the camps. He had interviewed his father and had 19 hours worth of tapes, and tens of thousands of color sketches that he used in refining down the visual look of the page. Each individual panel got honed down until it was almost a word in itself.

All that work, the only place you could see it would be in an exhibit, like at the Museum of Modern Art. But here, you can actually have all that material accessible in a way that lets you see the process. And most of the material -- this is the only way that it will ever be seen, the only place you'll ever get access to it.

How do you translate that to the computer screen?

The audio was digitized onto DAT tape, and cleaned up, because often, in the books, his father is on an exercycle while he's talking to him, and the exercycle really is in the background of the tapes. The audio is now accessible through the page that it actually became. So if his dad was talking about the crematorium, I've actually taken that piece of audio, and from that page, you can hear the audio of his dad. The sketches were all shot with a camera on a copy stand and turned into a Photo CD. They are also accessible from the page. If you want, you can look at the evolution of a particular panel, you can go and look at the journal entries that he made, trying to work out some of the concepts that were going to be on the page. For the places where he actually went to see Auschwitz in order to be able to draw it, you'll actually be able to see his home video that he took of the camps. It's amazing stuff.

What other projects have you worked on?

I worked on a relaxation program that was called Take Five, that was to take advantage of the fact that you actually can sit at your computer a lot, and there are ways that you can interact with it that could be healthy. You could do exercises to stretch the parts of your body that you abuse, like your eyes and your wrists and hands. You could also do guided visualizations...

Wait a minute. This is a computer teaching you how to work out?

Yep. You have to sit in front of it all day, so it helps you out. I mean, you don't do jumping jacks or anything, but you do work on the actual parts of the body that you're stressing by working on the computer.

Are we slaves to computers?

I don't know. I probably am.

What's going to happen in the future? What do you see in the future of mankind and technology?

I think it's going to be more and more integrated into our lives, and it'll be more portable. Therefore, it'll be everywhere. I'm really looking forward to the day when a project like Maus, you could actually carry with you on your portable, instead of having the CD-ROM player on the desktop. It is actually more like a book, except that it's this incredible amount of material, and it's color and it's wonderful and it talks to you, and all that.

My name is Erica.

What do you do here?

I'm in the production department. I do a lot of imaging stuff and preproduction, getting stuff ready to be made into a CD.

What do you like most?

I love the futuristic idea of what's happening here, how it's very unknown. It doesn't feel stuck in any tradition. I like all the ways that CD-ROMs can incorporate visual and audio, sort of a combination of everything.

Is there a certain attitude or philosophy at Voyager?

Hard for me to answer because I'm very new; I've been here about a month. But I would say, first impression, the attitude would be very supportive, and that people are really interested in making what's happening here successful.

What do you want to work on most?

Maus, to me, is something that is happening that I love. Also, any photography stuff that happens, I would love to be a part of.

What are your favorite products?

A Hard Day's Night, but that's pretty trendy. And I would say Poetry in Motion.