The website ArtMuseum.net in their exhibit, Multimedia - From Wagner to Virtual Reality (Packer & Jordan, 2000) proposed a framework of concepts which can be used to organize and understand the history and theory of multimedia. It is comprised of five key concepts:
Integration
The making up or composition of a whole by adding together or combining the separate parts or elements; combination into an integral whole (OED).
Integration can be thought of as a development from the artistic concept of mixed media, where different artistic media are used in a single composition. For example, combining painting and sculpture. An example of this definition can be found in the entry for multimedia in the Second Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary published in 1989:
Designating or pertaining to a form of artistic, educational, or commercial communication in which more than one medium is used (OED).
In multimedia however, media is a much broader term - it can represent any method of presenting text, audio, video, animation, scent, sensations, etc. Integration allows these disparate media to come together to form a coherent presentation (Wikipedia, 2007c).
The ideas of Richard Wagner, deal with these concepts of integration of the arts.
Interactivity
Reciprocal exchange between the viewer and the artwork, the ability to manipulate media and objects intuitively and with immediacy (Packer & Jordan, 2000).
Interactivity allows users to directly influence a work - which doesn’t necessarily have to be apparent, especially in the case of artistic interactive presentations.
Hypermedia
A method of structuring information in different media for presentation to a single user, usually through a computing workstation, whereby related items of information are connected in the same way as in hypertext (OED).
Hypermedia allows complex navigation of interconnected items of information - the most common example being that of the World Wide Web. Hypertext is a specific type of hypermedia. Hypermedia/hypertext relies upon the concept of interactivity to operate.
Vannevar Bush’s memex proposed some concepts of hypermedia and interactivity to navigate trails of information.
Immersion
The experience of entering a multi-sensory representation of three-dimensional space (Packer & Jordan, 2000).
Immersion makes the experience of multimedia richer by creating enveloping the audience in the created environment.
Richard Wagner used immersive concepts in his Gesamtkunstwerk.
Narrativity
The quality or condition of being a narrative or of presenting a story (OED).
In multimedia, narrativity refers to the ability to tell a story through non-linear, branching structures. This differs from a traditional narrative, that has a linear progression of events and ideas.
The ability for full narrativity only became possible with the advent of computers with powerful multimedia capabilities.