CD-ROM art

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

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:

• Doors of Perception 1 CD-ROM (1994) by Mediamatic - digital proceedings of the Doors of Perception conference.
• Cyberflesh Girlmonster (1995) by Linda Dement

Events

• Welcome to the Future! exhibition, iMAL, Brussels, 2015.

Links

• http://bw-fla.uni-freiburg.de/demo-transmediale.html