Even before you tear off the shrink-wrap, ScruTiny in the Great Round presents itself as a rather mysterious CD-ROM. The packaging says something about "interactive art," which doesn't help much. Is it a Myst-like enchantment, a catalog of surrealist prints, an elaborate paintbox of tools? What are you supposed to do with the thing? And what the hell does "ScruTiny in the Great Round" mean anyway?
The enigmas don't stop there. In their daring attempt to digitize the shadowy language of the soul, ScruTiny's creative trio - visual artist Tennessee Rice Dixon, multimedia designer Jim Gasperini, and composer Charlie Morrow - draw the user into a resonating hall of images, a spectral dreambook whose animated pages are scrawled with eggs and urns, burning knights and �oating sperm, ancient idols and liquid shadows. ScruTiny is nothing less than a four-dimensional alchemical collage.
The disc is based on a series of 22 limited-edition books of collage art that Dixon created a few years ago, delicate palimpsests that recall medieval sketchbooks, surrealist cutups, and the curious boxes of Joseph Cornell. You wander through this forest of symbols at a pace that would certainly put fans of Street Fighter II to sleep. Sometimes the stills, sounds, and minimovies you encounter "make sense"; other times they linger on the far side of mystery, seducing you into filling in the missing information with associative links from your imagination. But a story of sorts does gradually emerge: the archetypal cycle of creation, within which the great binary forces of human life (masculine/feminine, sun/moon, body/spirit) fuse, separate, and create new forms. Recitations from the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of Solomon, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, though occasionally forced and singsongy, lend a literary weight to the images, while a few whimsical bits help leaven *ScruTiny'*s generally heavy tone.
Despite the whiff of preciousness and profundity that sometimes wafts through these living pages, ScruTiny shows how much depth lies in a medium generally (and rightly) chided for being superficial and dull. Moreover, in a marketplace dominated by the violent instincts of the id, ScruTiny offers a far richer and more nuanced avenue into the digital imagination, one that confronts the figures of the subconscious not by filling them full of lead but by drawing them into the golden half-light of archetypal art.
ScruTiny in the Great Round CD-ROM for Mac and Windows: US$35. Calliope/Maxis: (800) 336 2947.
STREET CRED
Crash CourseMorphing the Creation
