Eric Fixler ran the show from 1993 to 1994.

Q: Tell me how Yorb started.

A: The person who can really talk about that is Dan O'Sullivan. The Yorb is essentially the brainchild of Dan O'Sullivan, and first went on the air in November, 1992. Two of the most compelling reasons behind starting the Yorb were, one, to stake out a space in interactive space on television where people could contribute. The real basis, or the attempted basis, of the Yorb is that people send in their own pictures and their own voices and their own faxes, and thus try to create some combination of synchronous and asynchronous conversation, that they use the media as their own space, where they make the show

The other important thing behind the show is that it's projecting an architectural interface model. So instead of navigating through a computer by folders, or by looking up directories in text, you find things the same way you would on the street, you know, looking at the dirt on the ground, seeing the signposts on the wall. We've never managed to achieve that in this iteration of the show, largely because at the beginning Dan chose to do this as a live, rendered project, a VR kind of thing. And the machinery that we have access to just doesn't have the horsepower to do something large and detailed enough to really implement an architectually modeled world.

The next iteraction of the Yorb, which we hope to see in about six weeks or so, that's a much larger world, a much more detailed world. It has a lot to do in it, a lot more real reference points that people can use to get around.

Like what?

It's a much bigger space. You're really in the space; the way Yorb is now, you're always kind of over the space. So for one thing, you're in it, and there are roads, and there are houses, and there are plants, just a lot of detail. You can really always see where you are in relation to other places, and every place is unique, and every viewpoint is unique. That's not true of the way it is now. It's much more like driving around in a van, through a real space.

It's not the planet metaphor, as it is now?

No. Now, it's a 2-sided disk, and it's a very big disk. One side is the realistic world, where everybody gets their own house, where they can upload their own files to, and they can decorate it. There are various different spaces, a town square, and art gallery, various kinds of chat spaces where people can talk about topics and refer to materials about those topics. There's a music jamming space. There are neighborhoods -- an industrial neighborhood, a suburban neighborhood, an urban neighborhood, there's a commons, there's a country.

There are wormholes in the world, which serve two functions. One, if somebody else says, "I want to build my own world," the wormholes serve as a gateway to their own worlds, which might not conform to the spatial design of our world. So hopefull that'll be a hook so that we can make Yorb a useful thing for different groups of people who have a task that somehow the bulletin board and the Internet and the TV and the voicemail and the fax, and the convergence of all those media, they can somehow make it useful to themselves. We hope to design it for people like that.

The other thing that the wormholes go to is the bottom side of the world, which is the crazy world -- the antigravity world where everything is just crazy and different.

Will there be exclusive places? Will you be able to visit other people's houses?

One of the most difficult things that we've had is that people would get a conversation going with pictures. We thought that people would just doodle things, just write things and fax them. But I think that people are a bit more precious about their stuff. We can take text in the world, but people don't seems to want to send text that way. And pictures -- there are a lot of weaknesses in using pictures as a conversational medium.

But to answer the question, yeah, everybody will have their own house that they can put pictures in, and anyone can visit their house.

Won't that be limited? I mean, how many houses can you build?

That's one of our design challenges. Part of what we're doing, and part of the whole struggle with this thing, is, where do you stop building the infrastructure? When is the infrastructure good enough that you're going to say, "OK, here, now come use it. We're going to leave it like this, we're going to really make it happen with what we have now"?

In any case, what we're trying to do is build an expandable infrastructure. Obviously there are some compromises that are going to be made. There will be a part of it that's like a bad suburban development, where the houses are identical, because they replicate themselves every time a new person wants to get one. But we'll figure out some way to do that; it's an important part of the concept.

When did you become the host of Yorb?

I started hosting the show in April or May of 1993. I wasn't the host for the summer, and then I resumed being host in late August.

How did it come about? How did you get involved?

In my first semester at ITP, I was taking a class with Dan O'Sullivan. My final project for that class was the beginnings of the graphical interface bulletin board. I built a little graphical thing so that people could send and retrieve picturres. It wasn't really a full bulletin board like it is now. After that, Dan hired me to be a graduate assistant. Naiwei Shu, who was already a graduate assistant, was with the show from the beginning, did a lot of the early groundwork with Dan.

What's the connection between the bulletin board and the TV show?

Basically, Yorb isn't a bulletin board, it's not a TV show, it's not a fax machine. In a way, it's kind of like a database. It's this place where all this stuff lives, and there are different ways to get at the stuff. Once a week, the stuff appears on television, and people can call in and talk about it and see it all on TV. Twenty-four hours a day, people can call in with their modems. It's not as live, a nd you're not speaking or seeing everything instantly, but you can get copies of everything. For every space that you see in the world on the show, there's a folder on the bulletin board. So you can send stuff in, you can get copies, you can leave commentary, and there's all the general effluvia of bulletin boards -- email, etc.

Then we have our fax system where, basically, you send us a fax and it'll be in the world. And we have our voicemail system where you can leave a voice message inside Yorb, and you can also receive faxes back to you.

How has the show been received by the public in Manhattan?

We don't do any formal research. I don't know how many people watch, how many people hate us or love us. We go through periods when we have a lot of technical problems, and people pull for us. They send us email and they're on the show even though the screen is black, they're rooting for us. There are some things about the show that are not complete successes -- maybe it's not as deep as it could be, maybe it's not as exciting as it could be. But I think that people understand and appreciate that what we're trying to do is provide a two-way space on TV. And let's face it -- no matter how much you want to criticize the look of the show or the technology behind it, or the instability of it; there is no other place on TV where someone can call on the phone, and initiate a conversation, be on TV and have this entire audience, and have other callers in that same space, and other people at their computer terminals typing and listening to them, and have an art gallery for themselves, and send their pictures in.

It's been disappointing for us -- I would thing, "Hell, if you give me a space on TV where I can send a picture, a drawing, a fax, leave my voice -- we thought that we couldn't buy hard drives big enough to hold the pictures that people would send us. It hasn't been like that But at the same time, I do think that people understand and respect that we're not as much trying to make a great narrative piece or art piece to show people. We're trying to make a structure that people can show eachother things in. I think that part comes across.

What would be the ideal Yorb?

Everybody can be there, everybody contribute in every way, everybody can make copies of everything, instantly. We've always been going for as much of that as we can grab, given the limits of technology, the money we have to spend. And more importantly, given the limits of what people have available. It's always been about bandwidth expansion. We want to have things available for people with good computers, but the most important design goal is to make as much available as possible to people who just have telephones. Everyone has one, everyone knows how to use it. We're really trying to work within the space of what people have, and expand what they have available to them.

What has been the strangest moment on the Yorb? You have a lot of regular callers, right? Who are some of the more interesting characters?

One thing that will always stick in my memory is: We used to have only one phone line so we could only have one person on at a time. Then we managed to wrangle three more lines. The first few shows that we had four phones, it was such a joy to have multiple people on. People used to sing. It was pretty incredible at the beginning -- people just loved singing and having their [animated] lips move on TV. On Echo [BBS that runs at the bottom of the screen] they sing too, but it's only typing.

It's also a matter of the people who call. We have this guy who calls and uses a digital delay on his voice. We have Jake from Squirt TV (a lot of people who host public TV shows watch our show. When we were on at 7 o'clock at night, we used have a lot of kids -- 8 to 15-year-olds. They would talk about it at school and arrange to call the show. The thing they liked doing the most was drawing -- we have a thing where you can draw pictures live on TV. You'd hang up on them, and they'd call right back. It was great because I think they didn't live so close to eachother, and they used it as a way to hang out.

[Shannon McGarrity, Yorb host 1994-5; Nick West, Yorb producer; Eric Fixler]

Do people get rowdy, out of control?

Sometimes. We've had people who have called and yelled and cursed a lot.

That doesn't seem to be a problem. It was a shock coming to Manhattan and seeing public-access TV. It's kind of anything-goes, isn't it?

Yeah, and that's why we can have a pornography space. The nice thing about having a lot of people on at once is that it becomes a self-moderating thing. When we only had one phone line, we had more people who just wanted to call so they could yell "Fuck you" on TV. With multiple people, it hasn't been a problem at all

Do you prefer to sit back and let people moderate themselves?

I kind of view my job as instructional -- telling people how to send stuff in. You still lose a lot in a conversation on TV -- people can't see eachother's gestures, sometimes they're not sure who is waiting to speak. So I try to keep the conversation focused, keep everyone talking about the same thing. But ideally there would be no host. The ideal Yorb is on 24 hours a day, and nobody's hosting it

How has the street camera worked out?

It's kind of symbolic. One of the things that makes Yorb interesting and meaningrul is that it can be this kind of vantage point on different networks and different places. It's a way that someone calling in at home can really reach out to another place. It does kind of become like a wormhole in space. It might be better if the camera was at street level, and people could see eachother. But there's still something there, something connecting things over long distances that's pretty interesting. I love the street camera, personally. We've had people dancing down there, we've had people making snow angels, spelling words out in the snow.

I noticed tonight that you invite people to come down to the studio. Has that ever been a problem?

I usuall do not invite people to the studio. It was purely whimsical, this guy talking about Spam. He hasn't come, thank God

What other kinds of things have you done here at ITP?

I did a show last year that was called LoveNet, that took a bit of a different approach. There were detailed puppet characters -- not just lips, full characters. They were very whimsical. The idea was that people call in and choose a character, and that kind of becomes their actor. So we ran a little talk show, kind of a farcical dating game. It was a set, and there were three shots -- a wide shot, a pan, and a close-up. It didn't look photo-realistic or anything, but used the convention of live TV, letting people be actors.

I'm doing some stuff now with public bulletin boards. I'm in the middle of putting in an Internet site and graphical bulletin board in a cafe here in New York. I'm very interested in public spaces.

What was your background before you came here?

Film and video. Immediately before coming here, I was teaching video and filmmaking to high school students, before that I was a freelance shooter/editor.

You're leaving the Yorb soon.

In a sense, it's time to move on. It's a great project, and it completely dominates my life. This is officially a 20-hour a week job; in reality it's been 20 to 50, and I think about it a lot. The thing I do now is mostly running the show. I want to get back into development, and I'll probably do consulting. I'm forming a company with two other people, focusing on networked communities. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about the Internet, a bulletin board, interactive TV, a public kiosk that records comments -- all those things are about doing things with people that are, on some level, about communication, and that's the kind of stuff we're going to focus on.

Is there an ideal project you're like to do some time?

I like working with kids. I guess that -- and I don't want this to be a slam on anybody or any ideology -- but there's so much prototyping that happens in the interactive industry. I'm more interested in seeing what we can do with real people now. The technology will catch up eventually.

Yorb is really the first thing of its kind, isn't it?

There's these guys from Germany -- Van Gogh TV and Piazza Virtuale. They're doing stuff very similar to what we're doing. They're a lot slicker than we are, but they also have a lot more people and a lot more money. We're definitely one of the first doing this kind of stuff. I think we're staking out important ground.

You know, they have interactive TV trials in Orlando, the business news everyday is all about interactive. It's all about these incredibly large companies buying lots of things so that they can do things like home shopping and video-on-demand. There's a place in the world for that, but I'm glad that we can say convincingly that we were on first because we're providing an alternative model. And I hope that as people do more sophisticated interactive things that this two-way model gets a little bit of space along with the home shopping and video-on-demand that's going to be all over the place.