CD-ROM art

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The CD-ROM was a relatively popular carrier for interactive artworks in the mid-1990s.

At that time, the world wide web as a platform was not yet capable of providing the rich, immersive, multimedia experience that artists desired. Simultaneously, this period witnessed the proliferation of personal computers that came equipped with CD-r drives, causing CD-ROM art to flourish as a form of creation and distribution.

Artists created very diverse works on CD-ROM, ranging from virtual spaces to game-like experiments, from interactive music environments to literature and hypertext presentations. Within an individual practice CD-ROMs often have a very special place: sometimes they are a unique interactive 'exception' in the career of the artist (Laurie Anderson, Michael Snow), other times they are part of a long series of works in different media (JODI, Antoni Muntadas).

Artists and works[edit]

Prominent publishers of CD-ROM artworks were Mediamatic (NL) and Voyager (US).

Contact Zones. The Art of CD-ROM by Timothy Murray was a travelling exhibition from 1999 to 2001 in which a large number of works was presented together. The exhibition website still exists and is an excellent record and source for several projects: http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/

Notable works are, among others:

Events[edit]

Links[edit]


Art and culture

Avant-garde and modernist magazines, Dance, Artists' publishing, Graphic design, Photography, Typewriter art, Multimedia environments, Design research, Video activism, Urban practices, Zine culture, Demoscene, VJing, Live cinema, Art and technology centres, Cyberfeminism, Art and activism, Community television, Hacktivism, Community servers, Hackerspaces, CD-ROM art, Circuit bending, Pure Data, Media archives, VVVV, Maker culture, Glitch art, Live coding, Locative media, Libre graphics, Electromagnetism, Surf clubs, DIY biology, Decolonial aesthetics, Post-digital, Neural aesthetics.
See also Visual art.