UK

(1999)

DESIGN PRODUCTION PROGRAMMING Digit MUSIC DiY SOUND Owen Lloyd INTERNET www.digit1.com WORLD SALES Digit, 6 Flitcroft Street, Soho, London WC2H 8DJ, UK TECHNICAL DATA Interactive CD-ROM Mac/PC

With repetition, the musical theme gains a hypnotic power. This DiY beat accompanies fleets of balls as they circulate within the screen. It takes a little while to learn how to use the mouse with them. The mouse leads rather than drags. A baroque mechanical device introduces an occasional cameo. Then it’s back to the balls… Balls is a medium rather than a message. We are left to imagine what other kinds of information might inhabit this dynamic space

USA

(1996)

DIRECTOR James L. Conway PRODUCER Dan Dugan WRITER Hilary Bader MUSIC Dennis McCarthy TRUE MOTION The Duck Corporation DESIGN Touchscreen Media Group CAST John de Lancie, Terri Potts WORLD SALES Simon & Schuster TECHNICAL DATA Interactive CD-ROM Mac/PC

This underrated classic of the interactive movie genre plays an intriguing game with the viewer. Borg is based on the Star Trek Next Generation series, as part of its questioning of the human-machine divide. The player is asked to identity with a young cadet, who is granted the power to act as his father during a mortal conflict. The agent of this time reversal is Q, who acts like an impatient director at the player's incompetent actions. The enemy is the Borg, an insect-like humanoid species that represents the ultimate paranoia of technological dominance.

Australia

(1998)

DIRECTOR Steve Thomas PRODUCER Kathy Symmons, Steve Thomas MUSIC Thomas and Dan Warner GRAPHIC/INTERFACE DESIGN Neal Haslem DISTRIBUTION Dataworks 81 Eildon Parade, Rowville VIC 3178 TECHNICAL DATA Interactive CD-ROM Mac/PC

CD-ROM can be a powerful medium for poetry. Layers of image and sound provide a way of plumbing the depths of a good poem. Kenneth Slessor’s Five Bells is a meditation on time and friendship. It takes its cue from the Arabian tale where a man immerses his head in a bowl of magic water, and envisions a grand epic tale. Similarly, immersing yourself in this CD-ROM helps re-invoke the life and times of this great Australian poem. The opening screen shows a writers desk, from which readers can gather together the threads underlying Slessor’s work. A mini-film and soundtrack gives the 1939 poem a fresh contemporary expression.

UK

(1999)

DIRECTORS Tim Etchells, Hugo Glendinning PRODUCTION Forced Entertainment INTERNET www.forced.co.uk WORLD SALES ZKM Institut für Bildmedien, Lorenzstrasse 19, 76135 Karlsruhe, Germany TECHNICAL DATA Interactive CD-ROM Mac/PC

Time has stopped still. Using QuickTime VR, you pan around a room. Bodies are frozen in time. An occasional hot spot appears that enables you to move into another panorama. In each of the rooms a series of events—from love affairs through murders, ghostly levitations, parties and even drunken hallucinations—are halted at some banal or significant moment. Gradually, the plot thickens. Like a fly on the wall, the viewer is free to move, explore and investigate. How are the scenes linked—as a causal chain or free association? Whatever story a viewer constructs from these scenes may not be the one envisaged by the makers of Frozen Palaces.

Intruder

USA

(1999)

PRODUCTION Natalie Bookchin AUTHOR Jorge Luis Borges INTERNET www.calarts.edu/~bookchin TECHNICAL DATA Web site

A short story by Jorge Luis Borges promises a curious tale. But to read it involves more than turning pages. Instead, viewers have to play the ancient computer game Pong in order for the story to proceed. How can something so profound be determined by the ultimate in trivia? Intruder marries to two opposing trends in multimedia—the ‘high end’ promise a new ‘fine art’ and the ‘bread and butter’ use of digital art to fiddle away time. Rather than protect fine art from the coarse world of Timezone, Intruder combines the two directly.

PAL

Australia

(1999)

DIRECTORS Cass Wigley & Luke Wigley MODELLING Grant Adam PROGRAMMING Luke Wigley GRAPHICS Mandy Morgan Natalie Wright SOUND Cass Wigley INTERNET www.medialight.com.au WORLD SALES Medialight Productions, 111 Moor Street, Fitzroy 3056 TECHNICAL DATA Interactive CD-ROM Mac/PC

PAL is a wily desktop character that pretends to have a personality, though both he and you know he is a mere computer program. Nonetheless, PAL is a companionable bit of software, even if a little temperamental at times. Some clever programming enables him to respond to your comments with an ounce of spontaneity. He also has some seriously interesting comments to make about recursion, of which he is a prime example. PAL helps us question the extent to which it is possible for human and machines to be friends.

USA

(1653)

AUTHOR Robert Hooke PRODUCTION Octavo INTERNET www.octavo.com WORLD SALES Octavo, 580 Second Street, Oakland, CA 94607 TECHNICAL DATA Interactive CD-ROM Mac/PC

The 17th century English physicist Robert Hooke pioneered many notions of modern science, such as elasticity of matter, evolution and diffraction. His artistic legacy is a book of illustrations that depict the wonders of 'inner space', reflected in our own time with films such as Microcosmos. The pre-modern veneration of insects as ‘god’s jewels’ is a curious parallel to our modern technological wonder of microprocessors. This high resolution Adobe Acrobat version brings this classic manuscript to the small screen.

Finland

(1998)

DIRECTOR Marita Liulia ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Ari Hirvonen PROGRAMMING Jacke Kastalli QTVR PHOTOGRAPHY Autti Hvuttinei INTERNET www.medeia.com WORLD SALES Medeia, Uudenmaankatu 2 K, 00120 Helsinki Finland TECHNICAL DATA Interactive CD-ROM Mac/PC

From the apartment of psychoanalyst Jack L. Froid, the player explores ideas about masculinity in a QuickTime VR environment. Esco, a hybrid of mobile phone and multimedia, guides the user through different works of fragile masculinity.

Panoramic landscapes reveal the sumptuous accommodation of a fictional psychoanalyst. Jack L. Froid is famous for his discovery of the ‘navel complex’, concerning our deep anxiety towards first cut that severed our uterine bliss. Froid’s presents his theory of men’s ‘womb envy’ as an attack of Freud’s obsession with women’s ‘penis envy’.

Panning around his rooms, we have the opportunity to become acquainted with not only with Froid’s ideas about male sexuality, but also his clients. An audio-editing suite provides us with startling real-life confessions of paternal conflicts. The rich Persian rugs on Froid’s couches harbour personal secrets.

As well as pricking our stereotypes of male sexuality, Son of a Bitch offers a rich array of interactive devices. The multimedia catalogue of male clothing is a visual treat. The extended Finish take on Death in Venice is strangely moving, despite its comic intent. And you need to look around carefully to find the password that will unlock the secrets of Jack L. Froid’s IMac.

While it is easy to be carried away by the technical virtuosity of Son of a Bitch, there is still a feast for thought in this CD-ROM¾ topped with a rich sauce of Finnish humour.

UK

(1999)

DIRECTOR Jane Prophet WORLD SALES www.ellipsis.com/catalogue/electric/ TECHNICAL DATA Interactive CD-ROM Mac

You start in a comic strip that can be navigated around the screen only slowly. Moving the mouse over different frames evokes atmospheric sounds. Curious animations pop up suddenly. You find yourself crawling around a story that is much bigger than the small screen can handle.

Travel through the frames gradually reveals the story of a mysterious heart transplant. The recipient P Donald Nym finds himself with more than a new organ. He seems also to have acquired a new self, the beleaguered Chrissy Hasting.

A stray mouse stroke plunges the viewer into the internal world of this couple. Navigating through various body parts reveals traces of strange communication between donor and recipient, from within the same body. Internal Organs of a Cyborg is an uncanny exploration of a divided self.

France

(1999)

DIRECTOR David Blair EDITING/GRAPHICS ASSISTANT Florence Ormezzano CAMERA Mark Kaplan MUSIC Beo Morales & Brooks Williams INTERNET www.waxweb.org SALES www.iath.virginia.edu/wax TECHNICAL DATA Interactive CD-ROM Fast Mac

Left to its own devices, WaxWeb is a linear narrative about Jacob Maker, the grandson of a beekeeper who brought Mesopotamian bees to the West. Maker’s girlfriend Melissa is descended from his spiritualist wife who invented a form of electric telescope for contacting the dead. Under Jacob, this becomes ‘bee television’ through which the dead convey their concerns about weapons research. At any time, however, the movie can be clicked on to branch off into a dense web of interconnections. In do doing, it develops a kind of intelligences comparable to the bee television, which is its subject. Today, the continuing role of ‘smart’ bombs in modern war grants WaxWeb renewed relevance.

USA

(1997)

DIRECTOR Zoe Beloff and the Wooster Group INTERNET www.users.interport.net/~zoe/ WORLD SALES 153 Norfolk Street #5H, New York NY 10002, USA TECHNICAL DATA Interactive CD-ROM Mac

Gertrude Stein's play Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights provides the text for this evocative CD-ROM. Designed for New York's Wooster theatre group, it provides a QuickTimeVR panorama for viewers to pan across, and to construct a journey through small movies. It depicts the transition from 19th industrial architecture to 20th century digital space. This transition occurs with an argument about whether reality is a game: Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning as a product of rules versus Turing’s belief in science as a mirror to an outside reality. Complementing this philosophical dispute is an occasional detour into feminine sexuality. See latest web work at http://turbulence.org/Works/illusions/

USA

(1999)

DIRECTOR Scott Becker INTERNET homepage.interaccess.com/~artscb/scb.html WORLD SALES P.O.B. 578956, CHICAGO IL 60657-8956 USA TECHNICAL DATA Interactive CD-ROM Mac

You begin in a lounge room, surrounded by books, answering machines, running shoes, photographs¾ a typical range of ‘stuff’ that might be found in any home. An inquisitive mouse will find among these things doorways into other worlds. They open into a series of morality plays about the rampant greed in contemporary society. These vignettes are remarkable for their pithy reflections on American capitalism and deft use of sound effects. The Selfish Universe hints at the future of soap-box oratory in a virtual medium.

Germany

(1999)

PERFORMANCE William Forsythe, Christine Burkle, Noah Gelber, Thomas McManus, Astrid Sommer, Christian Ziegler DECODING Nik Haffner DESIGN Christian Ziegler PROGRAMMING Volker Kuchelmeister VIDEO EDITING Yvonne Mohre WORLD SALES ZKM Institut für Bildmedien, Lorenzstrasse 19, 76135 Karlsruhe, Germany TECHNICAL DATA Interactive CD-ROM Mac/PC

The leading choreographer William Forsythe reveals the sanity of his method in this comprehensive dance interactive. With great detail, Forsythe outlines the variety of moves that constitutes his oeuvre. CD-ROM presents itself as the ideal medium for dance pedagogy. Control over the various instructions allows study through repetition. Use of white pen over video highlights the structures that are implicit in Forsythe’s method. This instruction is complemented by video sequences of final dances by Forsythe and fellow performers. Innovative, yet simple, this CD-ROM is a rare opportunity for virtual audience with a master of contemporary dance. It is also of more than passing interest to those interested in the potential of the medium as ‘add-on’ to existing arts.