FILMWINTER '96: Introduction to the CD-ROM Art Gallery

Is there any Art on the CD-ROM Frontier?

Introduction to the CD-ROM Art Gallery ba Erkki Hutamo

CD-ROM is currently undergoing a major breakthrough into the consumer market. The sales figures of CD-ROM drives for home computers have multiplied and their prices have dropped during the past 1-2 years. Simultaneously, the drives are rapidly getting faster, and they are becoming a standard feature of any Power-MAC or multimedia PC. Corresponding to this, the number of CD-ROM titles already on the market or currently under production has quickly proliferated. If mastering the full range of CD-ROM production was still possible for a diligent (and strategically well-positioned) observer in 1993, it has now become utterly impossible for any human being to have had hands-on experience of everything.

The international CD-ROM market has a commercial and corporate orientation. Even though it is still looking for its forms, it shows very few signs of brass risk-taking. Most products, however "innovative" their realization may be, fit easily within categories that have either been transposed from the already established fields of book publishing or mass media (film, television) or are directly related to already popular interactive genres, such as video-games. This situation is, of course, customary when a new medium is looking for its forms and its place on the market place, but it does not need to be.

There are, however, already innovative works that push the limits of the medium and don't conform to the pre-existing formulas. Some CD-ROM projects published by the pioneering Voyager company, such as the interactive version of Art Spiegelman's highly personal comic books about the memories of the holocaust, The Complete Maus, and the Residents' extravagant "interactive movie" The Freak Show, directed by Jim Ludtke bear evidence of this. Recently Voyager published a double CD-ROM documenting the results from the competition New Voices, New Visions which it organized with WIRED magazine and Interval Research in 1994. Although the quality of the works in the anthology is highly uneven, there is no question about the excitement and joy of discovery spurred by the new medium.

Independent artists are currently entering the CD-ROM frontier. As could be suspected, they have diverse backgrounds: visual artists, computer artists, graphic designers, photographers, composers, writers, videomakers, computer nerds. The challenges these pioneers face are numerous. They have to find solutions not only to technical or aesthetic questions, but to ones which concern production, distribution and exhibition. Should CD-ROM art start knocking on the doors of the corporate world for production deals, or should it deliberately remain a "cottage" industry? Should it line up with the traditional art world, or look for its identity from elsewhere on the expanding territory of the technoculture?

There are other questions: should CD-ROM artworks be distributed through the same channels as for instance games and edutainment, or should alternative channels of distribution be created? Should these works be conceived as mass-distributed consumer goods, or rather as more exclusive and expensive collector's items? Should they be aimed at domestic or public audiences? And, perhaps most importantly: what, if anything, will be "CD-ROM art"?

The artworks shown at the "CD-ROM Art Gallery" at the Stuttgarter Filmwinter provide some early explorations, some possible answers to the questions mentioned above. They are, however, hardly conclusive. In the case of the CD-ROM as a medium, the quest has just started. This quest concerns both the aesthetic "distinctive features of the medium" and the place of the CD-ROM in the framework of the media culture of the 1990's. One thing is clear: the enormous enthousiasm raised by these little optical discs. The atmosphere has perhaps some similarities with the pioneering times of video art in the 1960's and 1970's. Erkki Huhtamo
Professor of Media Studies
University of Lapland
Finland

CD-ROM-Galery curated by Erkki Huhtamo

All New Gen. produced by VNS Matrix, Australien 1994. System: Macintosh.

A cyber-feminist CD-ROM, or a "Game-Girl", an ironic deconstruction of a computer game, based on the quest of the protagonist All New Gen to destroy the databanks of Big Daddy Mainframe, sowing the seeds of a new world disorder. The work uses irony and humour to reveal the gendered biases hardwired into computer culture and products, and rewrites the codes for other possible utopias. Cyberfeminism is an active radical vector replicating throughout spiralspace, disrupting the techno discourse which has its genesis in the military/industrial Sector (aka Big Daddy Mainframe).

An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War von George Legrady. Produziert von George Legrady, USA 1994. System: Macintosh.

"This CD is an autobiographical non-linear narrative featuring early 1950's East European personal and official Communist material in the form of home movies, video footage of Eastern European places and events, objects, books, family documents, Socialist propaganda, money, sound recordings, news reports, identity cards, etc. These items, in the form of over sixty stories, have been arranged thematically in eight rooms superimposed on the original floor plan of the former Workers' Movement (Propaganda) museum in Budapest - the original contents of which have been in permanent storage since 1990. The Anecdoted Archive reflects my particular history in relation to the Cold War. Born in Budapest in 1950 near the end of the Stalin era, I left with my family to the West during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution." (George Legrady)

This CD-ROM is a an interactive trip into the weird world of the visual artist Bill Barminski from Austin, Texas. In the form of an interactive shopping mall, it presents the different artistic "goodies" Barminski has created over the years to "honor" the American consumer capitalism - in his own punk-influenced way. The material is rich, including all kinds of images and unexpected surprises. The organization of the work is purposefully messy - and hilarious. The CD-ROM also contains Barminski's infamousTex Hitler -comic strips, with an essay by Greil Marcus and a documentation about the controversy and debate they raised in his native Texas.

A surreal and weird, but poetic combination of the classic 19th century "chronophotographic" photo series by Eadweard Muybridge and the medieval illustrated codex format. The user creates different animated loops on the "book pages". "Shibayama's experiments through morphing invest Muybridge's analyses with a Bergsonian sensuality - remapping them into a continuous flow, a pulsing world. The effect is completely different than cinematographically animating them. The same time, but very different space is regained. Fluid space. Erotic and intensional, not extensional, it is time and space indistinguishable." (David d'Heilly)

A macabre, comic representation of monstrous feminity. Donated body parts collected during Artits' Week of the Adelaide Festival '94 have been used to construct a computer based interactive work. About 30 women participated in the original event by scanning their chosen body part and digitally recording a sentence or a sound. Conglomerate bodies were constructed from the information donated. Therse were animated and made interactive. When a viewer activates one of these monsters, the words attached to that body part can be heard or seen, another monster may appear, a digital video could play, a story or medical information about the physical state described by the story may be displayed. The user moves relative blindly between these; there is no menu system or clearly controllable interface.

Triggered by the death of the artist's mother in 1993, this CD-ROm explores the relationship between the mother and her daughter in a very personal, poetic manner. "This interactive journey incorporates thirty-five years of my diary and journal entries, my mother's and my correspondences, collected quotes, family photos and my uncle's collection of Super-8 home movies and videos. The 'look and feel' of the interface is based on the actual calligraphy from my diaries and journals." (Susan Metros)

The first product by the Media Band, a loose combination of several well-known audiovisual talents: Marc Canter, Jim Collins, Stuart Sharpe, Kelley Gabriel, Chris Watkins, John Sanborn, Mark Shepherd, Allison Prince and Michael Kaplan. The CD-ROM contains two works, UnDo Me and House Jam, wrapped up by an "Aether Rave". These can be best charactized as experimental music videos (or, rather, video-music pieces), free-form explorations of the unexplored creative possibilities of multimedia. In addition to many stunning (audio)visions and surprising interface solutions, the work can be appreciated as a challenge to the 1980's "special effects" genre of video art (epitomized by the presence of John Sanborn). Is this really a landmark of the imminent demise of video art?

A multimedia work of art, which integrates original artwork and collage elements drawn from various times and traditions; still images, video and animations; original poems and text excerpts from sources such as William Blake, biology textbooks, and the Bhagavad-Gita; and sounds, including treated voice, sounds from nature, and music. An evocation of the erotic alchemical drama of procreation. Travelling in time through a ground of chlorophyll and blood. An exploration of the interplay between the masculine and feminine aspects of life.

This work focuses on privileged depictions of the relationship between women and technology, including commercials showing women's enslavement by domestic appliances, industrial film clips revealing pervasive gender stereotyping in the workplace, and science fiction film excerpts that show the invasion of women's bodies by futuristic machines. Autobiographical anecdotes transcribed in letters to the viewer are collaged with these cultural artefacts, while mechanistic sound effect loops create a textural ambience. Interactive computer technologies are self-reflexively interrogated as consumer-oriented epistemes.