Alan Lomax was 81 years old in 1996 when he allowed us to produce the first videotape demo of his life work, the Global Jukebox. Lomax is an ethnomusicologist who spent six decades amassing one of the world's largest collections of global music and dance. He also lead a team which created a codification scheme for song and dance, allowing cross-correlation of the data with each other and with pre-existing ethnographic databases. When multimedia came into being in the late 1980s, Lomax said it is what he had been waiting for, and began building the Global Jukebox.

"Alan Lomax's Multimedia Dream"

Global Jukebox video demo


See Also:

Brief Review of John Szwed's Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World, 2011

"Where Are the Anthropologists?"

"Place Runs Deep: Virtuality, Place, and Indigenousness"

"Interactive Art: Maybe it’s a Bad Idea"

"Interval Trip Report #9," 1993

"Jerome Wiesner email," 1988



Credits

Produced by Interval Research Corporation

for the Association of Cultural Equity
Hunter College, New York

with the assistance of
the Interactive Telecommunications Program
New York University

Gideon D'Arcangelo, Director
Rachel Strickland and Gilles Tassé, Editors
Michael Naimark, Producer