Here, finally, is something to show sophisticated friends when they sniff, "When will there be something intelligent on CD-ROM?" Three artists' interactive work appear in artintact 1, the first issue of Artists' Interactive CD ROMagazine from ZKM, a multifaceted institute in Karlsruhe, Germany, that has ambitions to be the Bauhaus of the digital age.
Simplest in structure is "Manuskript" by Eric Lanz. What at first look like hieroglyphs become, on closer inspection, rows of tools - from salad forks to industrial saws to toilet plungers. The minimalist structure is an ironic commentary on taxonomic categorizations. Click on each tool and start a short video showing it in action. What's that? Oh, a ring sizer. The guessing game is surprisingly engaging, but ultimately a bit thin.
More complex is "The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers" by American artist Bill Seaman. Thirty-three sentences are broken into remixable groups of phrases, so you can produce absurdly poetic lines like "An ephemeral certainty triggers an enigmatic arrangement to escape the changing ramifications of a resonant desire." Videoclips associated with each phrase (panning landscapes, close-ups of machinery) allow sentences to be played as movies. There is an unfortunate pause between clips on generated sentences, though the 33 original sentences play more smoothly. The curious associations produced by jumbling video, sound, and text create an endless multimedia update of the Dadaist game "Exquisite Corpse."
Most elaborate is French artist Jean-Louis Boissier's "Flora Petrinsularis," based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's homonymous book about flowers and his famous Confessions. Rousseau's memories of 16 amorous encounters are dramatized in pairs of short looping video animations, mainly voyeuristic close-ups of fetish objects (a bit of lace slipping off a breast, a pink sash coming untied) and faces (a tear running down a cheek, a seductive off-shoulder glance). Sixteen varieties of flowers get parallel treatment. Often, the paired clips show the same scene with a slight gap in time, to uncanny effect.
The disc comes embedded in a handsomely designed book containing learned commentary on the works in English and German. These three pieces, which all began as installations, have been reworked into delicate little gems. Such intellectual meditations on the nature of seeing and interactivity won't be to everyone's taste, but at least you'll have something to show when the downtown crowd comes to visit.
artintact 1: US$49.95 Mac CD-ROM. US distributor: D.A.P.: (800) 338 2665, +1 (212) 473 5119.
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