Welcome to the Future!

Antirom is: Andy Allenson, Andy Cameron (deceased in 2012), Rob LeQuesne, Luke Pendrell, Sophie Pendrell, Andy Polaine, Nik Roope, Tom Roope, Joe Stephenson

"The Antirom collective was formed in 1994 by a group of Londoners as a protest against "ill-conceived point-and-click 3D interfaces" grafted onto re-purposed old content [...] repackaged as multimedia. Antirom felt they could do better than this multi-mediocrity, or at least no worse. The idea was to explore interactivity and try to understand what made an interactive experience engaging, a simple question but one that proved difficult to resolve." antirom.com

The NEA is a Devil's Advocacy group and entrepreneurial innovator of manipulative software, subliminal semiotics, and coercive advertising. BLAM!, is a hypermedia explosion that concentrates bad energy, good looks, big muscles, and a small mind into one Mac-readable CD-ROM. (supervert.com/nea/nea_agenda)

"With deafening volume, hyperkinetic graphics, and copious attitude, BLAM! wants you to rethink your relationship to your computer. [...] BLAM!'s image bank is overflowing with scanned images of gruesome medical photographs, close-ups of genitalia, and crypto-allegorical etchings. All of this aggression makes for a thrilling first ride. [...]" (frieze.com/issue/article/blam/)

If MTV and Monty Python got together and made a CD-ROM about a tool...it still wouldn't be half as cool as the Encyclopedia of Clamps. [...] The Encyclopedia of Clamps is a full blown reference guide to the most over-looked tool in the tool box...the clamp. [...] The other 595 megs contain an interactive 3D amusement park of over 32 exhibition "rooms" of artistic, non-corporate, funny and cool new media content filled with interactive comedy games and art. Including some seriously crazed humor and challenging interactive content; from game shows, award-winning short films, [...], new media artworks and shoot 'em up games. cyclopsboy.com

Using digital media to create original works of interactive art, the design team at De-Lux'O sets forth as its goal to challenge the preconceived notions of interactivity, content and technology. Utilizing a 3-D environment, the user can visit over 30 exhibition rooms that contain real works of interactive art - not corporate diluted pseudo art. Bill Barminski, Webster Lewin and Jerry Hesketh (De-Lux'O, Inc.) are challenging the preconceived notions of interactivity, content and technology. The core of this program are two intersecting hallways lined with Bill Barminski's paintings through which the user can enter with a click of the mouse. 90.146.8.18

This CD-ROM was created in an attempt to capture both the work and the personality of L.A. artist Bill Barminski. Hopefully, it allows users to go beyond what the standard documentary film or artist's catalog would deliver and comes close to the experience of actually getting to know the artist himself. The program contains numerous video clips, original music and other audio and, of course, a large number of paintings. Its graphical style follows the pop-art approach of the artists.
cyclopsboy.com

"Le cd-rom reprend tous les clichés de l'informatique et de la cyberculture pour en jouer : vocabulaire (les messages d'erreurs) ; présentation (pour survivre dans le monde numérique, il vous faut un "Kit de cybernaute"; culture du réseau et pratiques contestataires ; tendances "à la mode" ; cyborg et piercing ; érotisme machinique et cuir (attention, certains écrans ne sont pas nécessairement "visibles" par des mineurs et peuvent choquer des âmes un peu prudes) ; etc [...]
Par delà la dérision et l'absurde, avec une navigation simple et efficace, ce CD-ROM propose un regard critique sur les technomaniaques et une certaine techno-culture. L'humour sert ici, de manière remarquable, un propos beaucoup plus sérieux et invite à une réflexion sur le monde techno-scientifique que nous sommes en train de créer en en débusquant toutes les idéologies et mythologies implicites."
from Annick Bureaud in olats.org/reperes/offline/

josephinestarrs.com

MOTS-VOIR crée en 1989 à Paris la revue alire. D'abord publiée sur disquette. alire est considérée comme la plus ancienne revue de littérature informatique proposant hypertextes, poèmes combinatoires, générateurs automatiques, littérature assistée par ordinateur, textes animés, multimédias ou interactifs. Elle passera ensuite au support CD-ROM et au web.

On y trouve des oeuvres d'auteurs tels que Jean-Pierre Balpe, Philippe Bootz, Jean-Marie Dutey, Claude Maillard, Tibor Papp.

motsvoir.free.fr/

"Moments" est une approche originale de l'univers de J-J. Rousseau proposant une forme toute nouvelle de critique et de perception. A partir d'une connaissance rigoureuse du texte de Rousseau, Boissier fixe son attention sur des lieux, des images, des scènes, des passages de l'oeuvre: il les donne à voir et à lire. Il laisse à l'utilisateur une liberté de parcours très séduisante.
J.Starrobinski (notice du cd-rom).

Combinant le texte intégral de Rousseau avec une navigation hypertexte par mots 'embrayeurs', le cd-rom est aussi une expérience d'écriture cinématographique interactive: il propose des vidéos à l'interaction originale, sorte de temps mis en suspens qui donne par leur manipulation et "dépilage", à ressentir un lieu, un geste, un évènement.

The Kaos electronic literature magazine was published on floppy disk by the French company Kaos as a new year electronic postcard from 1991 to 1993.

Realised by Jean-Pierre Balpe, the father of automatic literary text generation, the issue #3 released in January 1993 for Apple Mac proposes generators by different authors: Jean-Pierre Balpe, Henri Deluy, Marie Etienne, Jasper, Gil Jouanard, Bassam Mansour.

Beyond is a mysterious virtual world. In a playful spirit of philosophical inquiry, it explores the paradoxes of technology, desire, and the paranormal posed since the birth of mechanical reproduction; the phonograph severing the voice from the body, photography capturing the soul and cinema resurrecting the dead. [...]
One might call it an investigation of the "dream life" of technology, from around 1850 to 1940 [...] an issue I feel important to bring to light as we enter this strange new digital realm. [...]
Beyond allows the viewer to explore a new kind of mental geography, in which they find themselves travelling through time and space encountering my virtual alter-ego who, as a medium, that "interface" between the living and the dead, transmits "movies" that record her impressions. The cd-rom is an extensive virtual world that contained 23 QuickTimeVR panoramas and 80 QuickTime movies.
from zoebeloff.com/beyond/dreamlife.pdf

This interactive artwork not only borrows Kafka's title but appropriates the whole body of his text, taking the multiple individual building blocks that make up the story and feeding each word into a generative computer program that randomly re-assembles them into new sentences. Transforming, at the slightest touch of the user, into skittering quicksilver combinations, the variations seem never-ending – an infinite line of words stacking up in an approximation of Babel; a textual Chinese Wall that is both extended and destabilised by this insidious play of Chinese whispers.

Started as a website, the project continued as a CD-ROM in which icons, graphics and audio, as well as text, could be interdependently rearranged by the action of the user. fvu.co.uk

Headcandy is a set of kaleidoscopic, psychedelic videos accompanied by music composed by Brian Eno. The CD-ROM came with two pairs of "prismatic" glasses which lenses refracts white light into a prism of color.
Brian Eno was very upset with the final the result that he considered not 'interactive or creative'. "When I saw the result it was so awful and terrible and disappointing, I've never looked at it again. [...] It's one of the only things I've ever been involved with that I feel really bad about."
music.hyperreal.org

Freak Show's Big Top offers amazing spectacles, but the freaks' stranger-than-fiction stories come magically to life when you sneak behind the circus tent and into their trailers. Discover fetishes, fantasies, rituals, and tragic secrets through photos, comics, music, music videos, and animation. You can even explore the history of freaks. Your fascination with "difference" will ultimately illuminate many other paths through this theme park of the imagination.
Featuring spectacular animation design by Jim Ludtke, Freak Show is a revolutionary new audio-visual experience, envisioning the future of interactive stories, music video, and digital art.

The Gingerbread Man is the band's first exploration of a new kind of album -- what they call an "expanded album". It combines the normal CD format with an interactive CD-ROM track and can be either played on a standard CD-player or played with on a computer. The album explores the personalities of nine characters and their "rather strange outlooks on life". Each character, according to The Residents, has the Gingerbread Man in them somewhere, represented in the music by the Gingerbread Man theme: Run, run, as fast as you can You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man... Each of the songs have the same general format: a 30-second introduction (which usually features the Gingerbread Man theme) followed by a verse sung by the character, and then a mix of comments and thoughts [..] The interactive CD-ROM program also uses the same format, letting the user play his or her keyboard like a visual instrument by triggering various images, sounds, texts, and effects through the keyboard and mouse.
Source: residents.com/historical4/gbm/

Bad Day on the Midway is a CD-ROM game designed and scored by The Residents and a number of other graphic artists, including Jim Ludtke. The game won the 1995 'Macrovision International User Conference Award' in two categories – Best Entertainment Title and Most Innovative Use of Multimedia. The game was optioned by Ron Howard at Imagine Television for a proposed series to be directed by David Lynch. After two years of meetings with Lynch, the project was dropped because a script was never agreed upon. Had the project moved forward, The Residents would have not been creatively involved as their contract only gave them consulting roles in the pilot.
Gameplay: The player can switch between the various game characters in order to solve a number of puzzles. The game has alternative narrative lines, with definite fixed story elements. The gameplay is centered around discovery via the different characters. The game has no save system and is time-limited. The player is faced with different puzzles and questions, such as how to stop a murderer without fighting, and the reaction to the backstory of the murderer.
Source: en.wikipedia.org

Puppet Motel, an art Cd-rom by writer, musician, composer, performer, and photographer Laurie Anderson, is an imaginary universe made up of the interplay between light and darkness, mystery and poetry. This universe is populated by puppets and, of course, its creator, the artist herself.
Wandering around the visitor is often tempted to put a story together from the succesive images displayed on a virtual TV screen in a "black jack manner" or from the objects found in a dim lit room but in the end he must realize that he has been chasing after shadows since the CD ROM does not belong to the tradition of the great narration.
These three dimensional virtual spaces are crammed with ghosts and secrets: the visitor is constantly taken by surprise. He is trapped, over and over again, by the virtual setting so he must switch off the computer and start again in order to escape. This platonic vale of tears radiates an enigmatical atmosphere which, all too often, appears manneristic and over-refined.
Source : artpool.hu/CDRom/Anderson.html

"I have been working on this Cd-rom for the past year with a wonderful group of creative people. I think we've managed to come up with a few new schemes that open up the stuff we create in such a way that you can explore it from the inside. We really wanted to pack it full of ideas. There's over 100 minutes of video,over 30 minutes of audio, more than a book's worth of text and over 100 still images, so there's lots of stuff to play around with and get lost in. Besides giving you the chance to get inside the music and videos and start playing with the material yourself, we think that the interactive pieces should be a lot of fun, so we have devised a few surprises that we hope will lead you on some interesting journeys."
Peter Gabriel

With: H. Chadwick, Y. Kusama, C. de Monchaux, Nils-Udo

Paradise has been lost. The world has turned to mud. You can travel through a mysterious evolving landscape, creating music, experiencing art and solving riddles in search of EVE – and the return to paradise.
The cd-rom is a collaboration between Peter Gabriel and various visual artists such as Helen Chadwick who contributed to create a captivating work.

"Delightful, intelligent, and moving, EVE is an experience you have, not a game you beat. EVE, follows the success of its predecessor, XPLORA 1: Peter Gabriel's Secret World, which it easily surpasses. The time and effort invested in the production of EVE is clearly evident. The game features 45 minutes of music and 80 minutes of video and involves about 60 notable contributors as well as Peter Gabriel himself. The inside of the game's packaging has a faux velvet finish and comes with a beautifully designed soft cover book, featuring art and interesting essays from artists highlighted in the game. [..]
EVE is a truly unique gaming experience. It manages to use not only visuals and sounds but also the apparatus of interactivity itself to convey meaning. In some ways, EVE does not ever end. There are always reasons to return, and even if you do not, there will be at least an image or idea that will always remain inside you. At some point in the game, there is a puzzle which, if solved, prevents disaster. However, failing to solve it actually grants you access to another extra world. Failure is thus rewarded, but this is no mistake. In most games, winning means never failing. However, true to the self actualization theme of EVE, loss is a necessary part of growing. Using gameplay to illustrate such a complicated human concept is a feat that few other interactive titles can do better."
Source: adventureclassicgaming.com

This captivating animated program gives an inspired twist to the phrase "it's a dog life."
Not that dog's life is simple. Hundreds of animated events have hysterical consequences. Successful hunting makes the Bone-o-meter rise... But keep an eye on those pesky cats! Sometimes instinct takes over-with hair-raising results.
Curious about what makes a dog tick? Consult the anatomical reference to discover how dogs "really" work. Master the art of canine aeronautics with the AeroDogs flight game.
Charming animation and terrific sound effects combine to make P.A.W.S a Cd-rom you can't keep your paws off.

Once Upon a time ...
A modern interactive story to read, listen, and " click " for boys and girls from the age of 5.
Mnémo, the robot falls into the Book of Lulu . Throughout the pages , their meeting takes us from the jungles to the ice on a fantastic journey , full of discoveries and emotions. An imaginary and poetic adventure comes alive from ink images and paper.
Thanks multimedia, the child will give life to an extraordinary story, and also discover the magical relationship that can keep the book and the computer.

This cd-rom is based on the book by Kveta Pacovska, a world renowned picture book artist and author from the Czech Republic. It was created by Murielle Lefèvre, Frédéric Durieu , Jean- Jacques Birgé.
Imagine letters weightless , letters affected by the grace of a perpetual dance, fluid, without constraint. Imagine that these letters have acquired autonomy, moods; they respond to mouse movements, keyboard, microphone and are fearful, greedy, mocking ; they produce sounds; they have a sense of rhythm, playing on the page, they play with us and make fun of us.

Minuit Fantôme is based on books by Jacques Duqquenoy already sold nearly 400,000 copies worldwide.
The castle of Henry, Lucy, George and Edward reserve you many surprises...
Magical plants grow in the garden!
In the dining room, ghosts' colors will change according to dishes: strawberries, gruyere and even chef's surprise!
At the top, in the tower, the ghosts are asleep. But what are they dreaming about?
Come on with Henry and his friends in their crazy adventures! You'll see, they are irresistible, tender but not always reckless... Help them find their way in the dark! Let's prepare their trip to Loch Neiss!
Become angler, disc jockey or projectionist...
Action !

This Cd-rom is a multimedia version of a work by Kveta Pacovska, a world renowned picture book artist and author from the Czech Republic.
The work was awarded the Grand Prix of the 6th International Möbius Prize on Multimedia (1997),a prize established under the patronage of UNESCO.
Midnight Play uses neither text nor narration, allowing children all over the world with different languages to enjoy its beautiful graphics and music.
Moving the mouse, clicking the character, children can also learn how to be interactive with a computer.
It is hoped that, through this Cd-rom,, children currently entering the Global Information Society will learn a lot from interactive reading, exploring a world of dreams and imagination.

Cosmic Osmo is a graphic adventure computer game for the Macintosh computer created in 1989 by brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, who went on to form the company Cyan and develop the best-selling adventure game Myst.
Although Cosmic Osmo was advertised as a children's game, people of all ages have declared themselves fans. The game has a humorous tone, and popular culture references abound.
Cosmic Osmo was developed in HyperCard with monochrome graphics (B&W, 1 bit/pixel), a simple point&click interface enriched with animations, sounds & music. First released on floppy disks, it was later published on cd-rom with additional music tracks.
Cosmic Osmo was already a very rich interactive exploratory world prefiguring the success of Miller's next title, Myst, released in 1993, a worldwide commercial hit, with critics lauding the ability of the game to immerse players in a fictional world.
Adapted from en.wikipedia.org

Flying Letters is a compilation of 10 interactive typographic pieces controlled with the mouse. As always with Maeda's work, Flying Letters demonstrates the perfect adequacy between the generated visual text, its meaning and the interactive gesture which controls it.
« Maeda is a graphic designer, artist, and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. In his work computation is a powerful method for uniting expressive and analytical thought. His designs, generated directly from written algorithmic code, have influenced the way the Internet and digital media look today. Maeda's Reactive Books, a series of five printed books with digital components on disc, are seminal works of interactive design and are poems of human-computer interaction.» Source : moma.org/
(The Reactive Books are in the collection of MoMA, New-York)
John Maeda as professor and head of the aesthetics + computation group of MIT was influential with his work Designing by Numbers inspiring his students Casey Reas and Ben Fry to create the programming environment Processing to promote software literacy in the visual arts.

Tap, Type, Write is an homage to the typewriter rendered in only black and white. TTW is a a realtime interactive instrument for the user to perform with the keyboard for one's pure aesthetics pleasure of making letters move, typewriter sounds and interactivity.
« Maeda is a graphic designer, artist, and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. In his work computation is a powerful method for uniting expressive and analytical thought. His designs, generated directly from written algorithmic code, have influenced the way the Internet and digital media look today. Maeda's Reactive Books, a series of five printed books with digital components on disc, are seminal works of interactive design and are poems of human-computer interaction.» Source : moma.org/
(The Reactive Books are in the collection of MoMA, New-York)
John Maeda as professor and head of the aesthetics + computation group of MIT was influential with his work Designing by Numbers inspiring his students Casey Reas and Ben Fry to create the programming environment Processing to promote software literacy in the visual arts.

12 o'clocks is a series of different visualization of how to display time
« Maeda is a graphic designer, artist, and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. In his work computation is a powerful method for uniting expressive and analytical thought. His designs, generated directly from written algorithmic code, have influenced the way the Internet and digital media look today. Maeda's Reactive Books, a series of five printed books with digital components on disc, are seminal works of interactive design and are poems of human-computer interaction.» Source : moma.org/
(The Reactive Books are in the collection of MoMA, New-York)
John Maeda as professor and head of the aesthetics + computation group of MIT was influential with his work Designing by Numbers inspiring his students Casey Reas and Ben Fry to create the programming environment Processing to promote software literacy in the visual arts.

The Reactive Square, the first Reactive Book, is an adaptation of Kazimir Malevich's painting Black Square (1915) for the dynamism and motion of the digital realm. It presents nine compositions that translate sound into motion graphics. Rather than awkwardly manipulating a mouse or keyboard, a user of The Reactive Square simply talks into a microphone and the square reacts and morphs in response.
« Maeda is a graphic designer, artist, and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. In his work computation is a powerful method for uniting expressive and analytical thought. His designs, generated directly from written algorithmic code, have influenced the way the Internet and digital media look today. Maeda's Reactive Books, a series of five printed books with digital components on disc, are seminal works of interactive design and are poems of human-computer interaction.» Source : moma.org/
(The Reactive Books are in the collection of MoMA, New-York)
John Maeda as professor and head of the aesthetics + computation group of MIT was influential with his work Designing by Numbers inspiring his students Casey Reas and Ben Fry to create the programming environment Processing to promote software literacy in the visual arts.

"In 1995 the now disappeared but profoundly influential Tokyo based publisher Digitalogue published "The Reactive Square" the first of John Maeda's "Reactive Books", careful explorations of paper and computer based art. The diskette contained a collection of 10 stylish games that used sound input to modify the image of a square. A very simple appearance belies the complexity of the program. It is a minimalist masterpiece.
3 years later, in 1998, Tota Hasegawa published Microphone Fiend - Interactive Sound Plaything. 9 small windows around a gangster's face react to microphone input to explore different aspects of the yakuza life - « driving fast », « I don't need a woman », « I'm not crying » (as a tear rolls down his face), « feeling hungry ? », « cant stand him », « find his weak point », etc."
Source: Pedro Soler, "PLAY MUSIC, videogames and music", root.ps/textes/musica_i_videojocs/

Microphone Fiend was first self-published by the artist and later re-published by Digitalogue.

"Remember Jaime Levy, purveyor of the hip electronic zines Cyber Rag and Electronic Hollywood? She's been busy recently pushing the E'book envelope with the creation of Ambulance: An Electronic Novel.
Based in the Director program, Levy has combined 3 potent elements: artwork by Jaime Hernandez (of Love & Rockets fame), sampled music by Mike Watt (bass player from fIREHOUSE), and a particularly nasty story by Monica Moran (founder of Sinistry Press). Ambulance is about some Gen-Xers who run into a string of spectacularly bad luck involving a car accident and a serial killer disguised as an ambulance driver. One of the most effective elements here is the music sampling. The droning repetition of the musical phrases, over & over while you absorb slices of the story, gives the whole experience an obsessive, claustrophobic feeling."
Source: Peter Sugarman in streettech.com

by Global Positionning System
OIGO ROM Sector GPS
José Manuel Palmeiro Rodriguez
Una produccio de l'institut Universitari de l'Audiovisual de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 1998

This cd-rom is an interactive investigation into the life of Rosalind Brodsky (an alter ego Suzanne Tresiter invented in 1995 with whom she shares similar Anglo/Eastern European/Jewish roots), a delusional time traveller who believes herself to be working at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI) in the 21st century.
The Institute is a government funded research centre based in South London. Established in 2004 its mission is to carry out interventional historical, anthropological and scientific research through means of time travel.
Your journey takes the form of a tour organised by the Institute in memory of Brodsky's contribution to time travel research.
Suzanne was envisionning the near futrue and designed a 124 page full colour hardback book to house the cd-rom because of the inevitable obsolescence of the digital material. To have all images represented in book form, although non-interactive and linear, at least shows the main contents of the work.
More on: suzannetreister.net

The title 18:39 is a nod to the official date of the birth of photography (1839).
The interface is made of a black and white photograph covered with a grid cutting the space into 16 blocks, 16 entries each revealing information by successive zooms: fingerprints, blood analyzes, pieces of evidence, contextual keys.
The CD-ROM appears as a police investigation on a crime scene frozen at 18:38 . In each section of the image, the user has to complete a number of actions to return to the main navigation matrix.

Toesie Toons published on a floppy disk is a little sound toy using the toes of 2 twisted feet to play sounds.
From Steve Jones who also produced the Cybersounds for Mac floppies.

In 1999, Small Fish has been created at ZKM as a cooperation between the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics and the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media.
Small Fish is one of this new musical software instrument where music is defined and controlled by the user through interactions on graphical objects. By direct manipulation of visual elements such as abstract forms, circles, points, lines, or moving colored patterns, the user controls the musical generation process. The user becomes a performer playing his/her own sound composition by interacting with this new instrument.
Small Fish prefigures the many Sound Toys published on the Internet after 2000 and later on for smartphones and tablets. Since 2011, Small Fish is available on iTunes.

Digital Space included a cd audio and a cd-rom proposing a compilation of artworks by various artists exploring the relations between sounds, images and interactivity. Featured artists (works):
Tom Flemming & Chiara Grandesso, Adrian Ward (Sidestream), Mikko Maasalo, Scanner + Tonne, Extras,...

The cd-rom is the result of the collaboration between visual artist Stephen Partridge and composer David Cunningham.

A game of image, representation and reference: is what you hear what you hear; is what you see also what you hear; is what you see what you see? This CDROM contains a game with language, sound and text-related fragments with the statement "this is a sentence" at its centre.

The CD-ROM is broadly based around white-on-black short pieces of text, which act as both the interface to the interactivity and are the work itself. The sentences vary from the obvious and reflexive - "at the end of this sentence is a full stop" - to the contradictory - "this is not a sentence" - through to self referential statements - "these letters constitute these words". The sentences are also found within the video works referred to above and thus become recursive and tautological. The sound work(s) interfere, interpret or expand the navigation and discovery of the work. The work though at times playful, is not game oriented, there is no goal or "right" way forward. Indeed the work uses many semi-random clusters of sounds, texts and images so that is probably not possible to experience the same pathway twice. […]

I feel that the notion of interactivity is largely spurious - CD-ROMS are neither more nor less "interactive" than any other medium. What interested me in the form initially was its intimacy and its ability to bring together sound, images and text in a cohesive and integral whole. I was also attracted to the crude quality of quicktime video - reminiscent of the early video days."
Source: Stephen Partridge on in stalk.net/piano/sentence.htm

Leçon sur le son est un projet multimédia interactif d'Alain Géronnez initié dans le cadre de l'exposition CONTinENTproduite par iMAL en 2000. Il s'est ensuite continué en un livre finalisé en 2005.
Le cd-rom est construit sur une centaine de courts textes et aphorismes écrits par l'auteur à propos du son et de la musique. Traduits en une multiplicité de langues européennes (français, allemand, anglais, danois, espagnol, italien, finnois, portugais, russe, néerlandais, roumain), ils sont dits par une multitude de voix, accompagnées par des montages d'images. Le cd-rom propose une formulation interactive du travail complexe de montage visuel, graphique, textuel et sonore typique de la démarche de l'artiste.
Le Livre continue le cd-rom en proposant des textes et aphorismes supplémentaires et en déclinant pour un support papier ce travail de polyphone visuelle, graphique et textuelle.

This work is a collaboration between Antoine Schmitt and Vincent Epplay, two renowned french artists.
It was presented as the first infinite CD to be published and distributed. The CD-Rom application produces generative music by combining different sound pieces created by musician Vincent Epplay along the algorithmic composition rules coded by Antoine Schmitt.
As described by the artists, this CD-rom, "indefinitely generates music, always different, always similar."
gratin.org

The cd-rom is the result of the collaboration between musician J-J. Birgé and digital artist & developer Antoine Schmitt.
Zapping of 111 video loops.
 Symphony of noises and music.
 A critical and sensitive vision of the planet.
 An interactive artwork with a surprising behaviour.
Machiavel interacts very differently if your movements are fast or slow, tender or brutal. Some behaviors tame it, some twart it. But who is pulling the strings?
machiavel.net

An interactive sound and image installation at your disposal. The CD-ROM started with material from the performance Rotary Factory. Black&white super8mm filmloops and mechanical music are translated to a digital environment.
doingfilm.nl/films/toys.html

Jodi (jodi.org) is the artist duo made of Joan Heemskerk (NL) and Dirk Paesmans (BE), who became known as pioneering net artists in 1995. One of Jodi's first works appeared on the BlindRom cd-rom (Mediamatic, 1993).
"The greatest struggle for net.art is to prove its autonomy. Marshall McLuhan's useful insight, that the content of every new media is generally the previous media, reminds us of the potentially schizophrenic nature of art as it changes over time. For net.art, autonomy means making art that is truly native to its medium. [..]
Issued on both CD-ROM and as a stand alone application, OSS has the ability to mimic a computer operating system. Once launched, OSS hijacks the computer and forbids it from functioning normally. Like an operating system, OSS controls the appearance and functionality of the entire visual environment including desktop and pull-down menus. Within this counter-intuitive (if not frightening) interface, OSS presents the user with a series of abstract, computer-based aesthetic experiences, many of which continue the chaotic, "computer virus" style seen at the Jodi web site. Using CD-ROM however, Jodi is able to obtain a much more immersive effect. Images and shapes take over the entire screen, not simply within an internet browser window."
Source: rhizome.org/discuss/view/28540/

A set of computer viruses (Timid, Kilroy, Intruder, Stealth) published as a limited edition on 3.5" floppy disks.

"In 1994 A killer piece of early computer art was made by the Chicago artist Gregory Green. Literally a killer piece — a computer killer, it consisted of a set of the notoriously lethal viruses Timid, Kilroy, Intruder and Stealth, together with printed sheets of relevant code. The frisson is compounded rather than removed when you discover that the viruses were still alive, though on obsolete floppy disks."
Source: spearswms.com

More on the artist Gregory Green.

Franck Slama, aka Invader is a French street artist born in 1969. In the mid 90's, he produced and distributed himself in public space 3.5" floppy disks full of interactive content.
Pop-uP readme:
Clicking on an image shows a text, then a sound and another image. At first suprised by this rich flow, one will discover narrative patterns and a web of associative ideas.
Pop_uP universe is familiar while being weird, outlining a kitch and contemporary mythology. The first picture showing screaming chickens in plastic wrap is typical. The overall aesthetic is simple and light: pictures on monochrome background, easily understandable texts and user friendly navigation.
Pop-uP is part of a series of interactive essays based on one unique constraint: be packed in the 1.4Mb allowed by one 3.5" floppy disk.

"An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War" is an interactive CD-ROM and computer-media installation project that explores the inscription of historical narrative through the process of archive construction.
Born in Budapest in 1950 near the end of the Stalin era and having grown up in Canada in the sixties' counter culture movement, the "Anecdoted Archive" reflects my particular hybridized history in relation to the Cold War. This non-linear index, or narrative features 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, Western media reports, etc.

They are part of my collection of things and stories related to the Cold War that I have gathered during the past 20 years. 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" museum in Budapest, the official propaganda museum of the Communist Party.
[...] Interactive media and the digital environment are dependent on metaphor as the mode by which information, transformed back and forth from screen to memory, are given meaning. The "Anecdoted Archive" narrative also functions through a recognizable metaphor that makes access to the information meaningful: the museum as an architectural model and the museum floorplan as a conceptual space.
Source: mat.ucsb.edu/g.legrady/glWeb/Projects/anecdote/Anecdote.html

The aim of this piece was to work with a group of people from Ashworth a high Security Mental Hospital to produce an interactive program embodying the life experience of those involved.
This is manifested in the form of an anonymous computer personality made up of the collective experience of the group. Ashworth Hospital is located in the north of England near Liverpool and is home and prison to people who are a danger to themselves or to people outside the hospital. The group of patients I worked with ranged from serial killers to rapists, potential suicides and casualties of the excesses of society.
The staff I worked with included psychiatric nurses of twenty years experience and orderlies. This artwork is about the recording of the life experiences of the client group that are a mirror to ourselves (‹normal society›) and our amnesia when confronted with the excesses of our society. This forgetting is a dark shadow cast by plenty, a nightmare for some that constructs misinformation and fear about insanity, violence and victims. This mental space is occupied by the psycho, the nutter, the mad dog and Bedlam; this is the space where strong fictions lie and invisibly glue together the mirror from which we view our own sanity.
This work is about people everywhere who are trying to remember the faces of the extras in the cinema of history. This artwork is a rehearsal of memories not quite forgotten. Evil, sleazy, dirty, dangerous, sick, immoral, crazy, or just plain normal.
Graham Harwood
Source: : medienkunstnetz.de/works/rehearsal-of-memory/

»artintact« is a combined book and CD-ROM package in which the ZKM presents pioneering works of interactive media art. It appeared annually from 1994 to 1999; every issue presented three new works by international media artists. It is a collection of art treasures of a very specific kind: the editions of »artintact« are among the few examples of concepts devised specifically for the CD-ROM medium. Each edition casts a new light on ideas and concepts of the practice of art in view of the variegated, forking paths programmatically offered by the medium. The »artintact« book contains texts on the works by various authors, along with detailed lists of the artists' works and biographical information.
(1) J-L. Boissier, E.Lanz, B.Seaman 
(2) L.Courchesne, M.Rogala, T.Waliczky
(3) K.Feingold, P.Hoberman, G.Legrady
(4) M.Griznic, D.Kiessling, A.Wiese
(5) Forced Entertainment, M.Fujihata, A.Hegedus
on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$5804

Advent is an interactive artwork that takes the form of an advent calendar. The user follows a trail through 25 days in the life of a fictional character. Each day reveals a series of explorable images, animations and texts which illustrate the protagonist's descent into megalomania. Advent uses gameplay as a way of exploring a complex narrative but, unlike many conventional computer games, the work is a multi-stranded and poetic in character, with the final resolution simply a coda and not the sole motivation for interaction.
More on clivegillman.net/cg/Advent.html
"In its atmosphere and its formal structure, Advent is conspicuously influenced by fantasy games like Myst where players are encouraged to explore a perfectly preserved but abandoned world in search of clues as to what has occurred. An equally fruitful comparison, however, might well be with the early short films of Peter Greenaway, with their obsession with lists and co-incidences and their ability to conjure an uncanny enigma from the apparently mundane. Advent has little of the science-fiction otherworldliness of Myst but rather revolves round a subtly-transfiguring poetry of the everyday, in which the creative interplay between image and text and the shifting relationship between internal and external landscape force us us to look at the world around us in a quietly surreal new way. As a game, it may disappoint players looking for fast-action thrills and spills, but as a meditation on landscape, perception and the psychology of human folly, it is a rich and rewarding piece of work."
Source: Steven Bode's essay on Advent

Passagen traces a series of elliptical pathways through Paris, London and Berlin, from the heights of the tourist viewing points to the echoing corridors of the underground railway networks.
Taking as their starting point the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin's use of the metaphors of panoramic vision and the labyrinth in his unfinished Passagen-Werk, Ellard and Johnstone invite the viewer to follow a series of slowly unwinding narrative threads- from the ecstasy of the aerial view to the sacrifice of underground travel.
Passagen fuses the pre-cinematic spectacle of the panorama and the post-photographic technology of digital media.
ellardjohnstone.com

I remember a CD-ROM project from the 90s that was unlike almost else appearing at the time. An ambient fluid flow of images and film, mixed with a unusual collection of audio, it created the feeling of moving through an urban environment. You had only the vaguest feeling of control of it all — almost as if you were being pulled through the city. It was a dream-like kind of experience.
The project was "Urban Feedback," and it was created by Giles Rollestone with Sophie Greenfield in 1995-1996 while at RCA. When I first saw it, on the I.D. Magazine 1997 interactive annual CD-ROM, I was sucked it. Collaged images, vivid colors, radio sounds, video, all moving together in a dark and mysterious space. You could control it — but, in a way like many other random/ambient titles of that period, you were never quite sure what control you actually had.
David Young in
inventinginteractive.com

...An anarchic intervention into interactive technology, the personal and the social combine in this fragmentary and kaleidoscopic work...
Jury of the Berlin Videofestival'95

...The interface is like that Monty Python record that had two grooves on the one side. BlindRom is that multiplied by a factor of 10...
World Art (Sydney)

...One of the most innovative philosophical CD-ROMs in the ROM market...
The Program/Granada Television (London)

BlindRom v0.9 is the prototype of an interactive magazine. The interface which poses as a predictable button-strewn contents page is in fact an anti-menu giving you access to a "fusion of Art, Mayhem and Music".

With: Henri Kawahara, Hiroo Yamagata, Yukiteru Nanase, Yukiko Shikata, Paul Groot, Willem Velthoven, Joan Heemskerk (the Jo of Jodi), Juan Cruz, Leo Anemaet, Micha Klein, Mari Soppela, Jacob Groot, Nat Finkelstein, Desiree Dolron, Linda van Deursen, Isabella Z., Shigeki Yamada, Herman Gorter.

The cd-rom was distributed with Mediamatic magazine, Vol7#3/4 The End of Advertising

geraldvanderkaap.com / mediamatic.net

Mari Soppela's Family Files CD-ROM uses, as its visual raw material, the home movies made by her and her husband, Leo Anemaet, filmed in the archaic Super-8mediem. The material is divided into fifteen episodes from their family life, recorded over the past four years. [...]
But how come watching these extremely recognizable pictures of familial bliss doesn't lead to a depressing encounter with random banalities? Because of the form with which the CD-ROM's user views and controls these images. This CD-ROM's interface is as radical as it is clear, which results in a balance being struck between intimacy and distance. Without symbolism, without interpretation, and without artistic mystification, these highly recognizable commonplaces demonstrate their poetry.
Source : mediamatic.net

Idea-ON>! is a manifestation of fragments of personal reality in what appears to be a living, breathing world. This approach to multimedia rejects traditional flat user interface design, and offers the user many different forms of engagement through four new realities, each prototyping different aesthetic, structural and communication-based
approaches to virtual space.
It is interactivity for interactivity's sake, experimentation with what is possible, experience-based as opposed to information-based. Things may happen without user interaction, more obscure exploration may be required to find hidden places, or responses given by the objects and beings will vary, often following a surreal kind of logic.
Visiting the Idea-ON>! world can be likened to visiting a sacred site where spirits and myths reside. The information space inside the computer becomes a dreaming or meditational space, a manifestation of the subconscious where the objective contents of thoughts are stored for others to explore and experience.
Similar to the way pre-linguistic societies would have a shared body of myths and legends which made up their perception
of the universe, a world like ldea-0 > ! jumbles together elements of popular culture and virtual language. The end result is a prototype of a dreamlike, surreal, communal cyberspace in which the perception of synthetic media reality is reconstructed/mutated.
Source: mediamatic.net

Let Your Mouse Roll
V.O.L.V.O Airbag features Pinky, Richard and Lennart, the three faces of V.O.L.V.O. For a prolonged version of their one-song concept, DJ's who regularly in clubs in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, London, Ibiza, Rimini, New York, Brussels and Chicago, made different remixes of the original song Airbag can save Lives.
Accompanied by films of multi-talent Yariv Alter Fin, and surrounded by products of V.O.L.V.O.-friends, this CD-Rom gives you the ultimate state in music and dance. [..] This musical experiment, this portrait of the hype-popgroup V.O.L.V.O., this series of remixes of the song Airbag can save Lives, are all set up in an interactive form regulated by the so-called "Angels" - typical Mediamatic code, used here for a journey set as a film-noir-like experience. This is not a disk with the face of an anti-menu like the BlindRom, nor an image of hypertext-networking like the DopRom, but a cinematographic experiment.
And be aware: interactivity was never so intergrated with your mouse:never let your mouse down, try out the possibilities of your mousepad and let your mouse roll...
Source: mediamatic.net

Florian Thalhofer grew up in Schwandorf, a small town with a population of 27.000 people not far from the Czech Republic. At that time Schwandorf was cut off from the east by the iron curtain – it was the end of the world. Life took place elsewhere, news about it came to Schwandorf on radio-waves from Munich and through a well connected friend, who also organized concerts in the next bigger city. Then suddenly Schwandorf became the focus of attention: A nuclear reprocessing plant was planned to be built in Schwandorf. Protesters came, protestors went, Schwandorf stayed.
Small World was Thalhofer's first attempt at creating an interactive narrative, and predates his development of the Korsakow System by several years. 'Small World' has been exhibited internationally, and won the literatur.digital award in 2002.
Source: thalhofer.com/

Just from Cynthia is a CD-ROM that Alberto Sorbelli made during the X/Y exhibition, the contemporary part of Femininmasculin, le sexe de l'art at the Georges Pompidou Centre in 1995.
He set up a workshop there, which brought together a team of around thirty participants from different fields, working throughout the exhibition period. [...] the CD-ROM is the final result of a process of work in situ.
He transformed an exhibition space into venue for creation and acted as a producer, capable of mobilising the time and energy of a team over several months.
The CD-ROM's composition is inspired by the format of 'people' or women's magazines. It contains a series of topical headings: people, health, beauty, leisure, etc., treated in a different manner by each of the participants. Cynthia, the CD-ROM's figurehead, really was a trainee at the Georges Pompidou Centre during this period, as being a character invented for the occasion. The character is more a pretext than a real heroine – she is the element that links all the sections together and creates a fictional fabric. [...] Alberto Sorbelli has chosen the codes of representation of the press [...] and mixed them within an artistic universe that is ill assorted and anachronistic, based on quotations from Proust, a parody of Socratic dialogue and interactive sequences that exploit the technical possibilities of the CD-ROM.
The cd-rom was acquired by the collection of Centre Pompidou.
Source: newmedia-art.org

The poetic and dreamy interactive "book" ScruTiny in the Great Round is a collaboration by a graphic designer/writer, a writer/visual artist and a composer (Charlie Morrow) which utilize the intimate and intuitive potential of the CD-ROM to evoke "the erotic alchemical drama of procreation. Traveling in time through a ground of chlorophyll and blood, we explore the interplay between the masculine and feminine aspects of life". The user proceeds from scene to scene by moving cursors disguised as the sun or the moon or birds. The outcome of every move is unpredictable, like in a dream.
Source: Erkki Huhtamo in Art on the cd-rom Frontier.  Scrutiny is dark and intriguing, like a forest that you wander through with no particular goal in mind. Magical sights and sounds are hidden in the underbrush, waiting to be revealed with a click of the mouse. You have no idea where the many branching paths will take you, but you learn to look forward to each one as a treat for your eyes and ears.
Source: awdsgn.com

It's in the company of the Angel Gabriel, main character of this adventure where there is neither beginning nor end that we make the journey through mythical universes. But what is Gabriel looking for in in this labirynth ? Precisely to meet Satan and bring about his ocnversion ! On the way, we will encounter: Lilith and Eve disputing the title of the first woman; Lili the hysterical announcer; Adam suffering for his terrestrial paradise; a seductive nymph; a hunting satyr; an old madman; a young philosopher; not forgetting moon and sun, frogs, snakes, hydras, unicorns, witches ... and finally Satan in person!
Half entertainement, half teaching about hte inner meaning of certain symbols, this journey is an invitation to the world of the child who still dreams in us, a simulation of the imaginary through ideas whose roots dive into the troubled water of the psyche.
agencetopo.qc.ca
tell-a-mouse.be

CyberFlesh GirlMonster is an interactive work using scans of body parts collected during Artists' Week of the Adelaide Festival 1994. About 30 women participated in the original event by donating these scanned flesh part of their bodies and by recording a sentence or sound. Animated and interactive monsters were created from these donated body parts.
By clicking on one of these monsters, the viewer can hear or see the words attached to a specific body part. From there, another monster may appear, a video is played, a story or medical information about the physical state described by the story, may be displayed.
There is no menu system or clear controllable interface and the user moves relatively blindly between the different elements of the work.
lindadement.com/cyberflesh-girlmonster.htm

The CD-ROM material are home movies and art videos of visual artist Michel François. From them, it proposes an interactive experience made of 120 spontaneous clips, 120 instants of irony and beauty. The cd-rom is the adaptation of the installation "ACTIONS" created for the CONTinENT exhibition, Brussels/Helsinki, 2000. It was co-produced by iMAL, Magic Media with the support of Brussels 2000.
The cd-rom was acquired by the collection of Centre Pompidou.
imal.org/actions/actions.html

Ambitious Bitch is a visual zeitgeist study of western feminity at the turn of the millennium. It presents a new way of approaching the female future: with self-irony, a randy wit and quirky brilliance. Ambitious Bitch communicates with challenging visuality, rich audiospace and an innovative navigation system.
The work draws heavily upon crossdisciplinary material including sociology, philosophy, cultural studies and statistics. The work combines photo manipulations, video, sound and animation..
More on maritaliulia.com/

The eagerly awaited Cd-rom by Marita Liulia takes you to the thrilling world of Dr Jack L. Froid.
This expert in masculinity has mysteriously disappeared but this discoveries are witing for you... Impressive visuals and sounds plus a QTVR interface.
Humorous, witty, informative : SOB seduces both men and women !
More on maritaliulia.com/

Die Veteranen are KP Ludwig John,Stephan Eichhorn, Tjark Ihmels & Michael Touma.
"Take four German avant-gardists who consider themselves veterans of analog art forms, share a dissatisfaction with establishment forms of entertainment, and who have taken to the digital age without sacrificing a shred of their artistic integrity. Give them a pile of state of the art hardware, a great programmer, and a year. The result? I've never met before a CD ROM more difficult to describe. Neither game nor gallery,
Die Veteranen is a total artists' environment, a mental space to simply lose oneself in. Meandering with only hints of navigational assistance, one can soon forget that the computer is a machine; that it is instead an extension of the imagination's deepest abstractions. So what happens? Modern impressionist paintings move, fold into one another, blend into and out of the background. Sounds blurt forth in otherwordly tongues, corresponding or not to the visuals. Images dance about wildly or placidly – you can only guess whether clicking on them will lead you to other areas or not. Movies hang in mid-air, awaiting your input for further manipulation. Works become a launching pad for other forms of works, which in turn lead to other artists. And to its high credit, much of Die Veteranen has a loose, painterly quality that doesn't leave the metallic taste in your mouth you get from so much digital art. There seems to be a deeply seated randomizing engine working behind the scenes, which not only keeps things interesting, but makes it difficult to return to areas you want to revisit. No matter – there's always something else interesting around the corner, like the sound-looped interview snippets with modernized natives from around the world, or the dynamically interactive paintings which evolve as you move, drag, or click your mouse, flipping color pallettes and intricately abstract subject matter around in both peaceful and frenetic modes."
Source: Scot Hacker review on archive.birdhouse.org

The ToyBox was a project developed as part of Video Positive 95. The piece was an anthology of artist's works contained on a CD-ROM, published and sold during the festival in Liverpool. Each artist was asked to respond to the idea of creating a piece of work which they would like to find in a digital toybox.
The CD-ROM contained works by the following artists : Justin Bennett, Charlotte Corke, Alison Craighead/Jon Thomson, Jeremy Diggle, Jon Dovey, F(UK), Christopher Hales, Rory Hamilton, Troy Innocent, Peter Maloney, Robert Mettler, Julie Myers, Steve Partridge, Janni Perton, Nina Pope, Roy Stringer, Simon Schofield - Simon Tuner - Jane Wood
Clive Gillman was the Creative Director for the piece and also facilitated and collaborated on a number of the projects.
Source: clivegillman.net