<nettime> Who remembers CD-ROMs ?...

["JRabie" <joe@overmydeadbody.org>]

Another part of the history of computer art and media, CD-ROMs, running on
computer but also on strange machines like Apple's Pippin, seem to have
quite disappeared from the books. There was that brief period, which
started with video discs, went on to CD-ROMs, which with the arrival of
the web and interactive Flash at the end of the nineties was gone and
quickly forgotten.

Who remembers the Voyager Company, founded by Aleen and Bob Stein, at the
border between artistic expression and the first CD-ROMs? Together with
Wired and Interval Research they organized an international competition in
1993 called "New Voices, New Visions". I got a mention for an interactive
cartoon strip, probably the first of the genre.

Joseph Rabie.
www.joetopia.org


> even in the u.s. - i was in Providence in the late 60s/early 70s doing
> computer art, showing in 71; there were people working with lightshows
> earlier than that. these histories are all canonic histories and ignore -
> at least in this country - a lot of what went on. chris funkhouser's
> Prehistoric Digital Poetry covers some of this ground. and this stuff
> sloughs off into people who built video and sound synthesizers using
> analog computer components - we built one of the latter in 68 from
> scratch. it's like the 'history' of electronic lit in this country -
> things like irc/newgroups/bbs/moo and mud programming are usually
> excluded. what's needed is a monumental, encyclopedic, and generous
> accounting for as much as possible world-wide, not this focus on media
> artists who happened to grab media attention. i should mention that so
> much was visible from MIT, San Francisco, NYC, LA, etc., that regional
> work was almost entirely ignored.
 <...>


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