

The exhibition travelled to three locations in the USA, in addition to Canada, Mexico and France. The 1996 exhibition Burning the Interface in Australia and Contact Zones: The Art of CD-ROM (1999–2001) were entirely composed of CD-ROM works that visitors could interact with on computers in the galleries.Ĭontact Zones showed the work of over 90 artists, including Keith Piper, whose CD-ROM work Relocating the Remains is a case study for this research project. Some galleries expanded their offerings to include works on CD-ROM and sold them in editions, and curators who championed digital media as an emerging field included these works in exhibitions. This type of partnership sent multimedia art directly to viewers and supported a wider audience than galleries alone could.ĬD-ROMs enjoyed time in the spotlight in the 1990s and early 2000s, with artists sharing their latest projects at digital arts festivals like Transmediale. Many CD-ROMs were added to printed formats like books as supplemental material that extended the content and provided an incentive for consumers. Publishers also saw great potential in the CD-ROM format as a distribution platform because it could sit alongside print production as a mass medium. It seemed that a whole new world was being birthed, and the creators were making it into whatever they wanted it to be. The opportunity to work creatively with interaction, images, animations and sound on a new platform, the home computer, was empowering and exciting. Some established artists like Laurie Anderson and Antoni Muntadas made CD-ROM projects, and many new artists were drawn in by what digital media had to offer. This new creative medium, called multimedia or interactive digital media, was appealing to artists as an expressive tool with more possibilities than anything else up to that point. With these elements in place, it became possible for many more people to create media content and distribute it. 1Īnd CD-R optical discs, which held almost 500x more data than a standard floppy disk, became widely available at an affordable price point.
#SHEEPSHAVER MAC ETHERNET INTERFACE PC#
ISO 9660, a digital format standard, was expanded to support the type of multimedia content being created and to be readable on both PC and Macintosh systems.
#SHEEPSHAVER MAC ETHERNET INTERFACE SOFTWARE#
Software like MacroMind Director was released, which could create interactive digital animations. Then along came a few game-changing developments that enabled the explosion of CD-ROMS. The only moving image content came from television and movies (either the homemade kind, on VHS, or from major production companies), but they could not be watched on your computer because it had enough trouble just running word processing software. The World Wide Web did not yet exist for the general public. To understand how revolutionary CD-ROMs were in the 1990s, let’s set the scene: the first personal computers had only been around for a few years and graphical user interfaces with a mouse were still a recent development.
