"Techno Ecologies" Participants

ABSTRACT
The CD-ROM is a medium that occupies a particularly unique moment in the history of media art production. In the mid-90’s, the world wide web was not yet capable of providing the rich, immersive, multimedia experience that artists desired. At that time, personal computers came equipped with CD-r drives, causing CD-ROM art to flourish as a form of creation and distribution. Artists created very diverse works, ranging from virtual spaces to game-like experiments, 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). Yet CD-ROMs as artworks are not very well known, they are often on a ‘forgotten’ shelf of institutional archives, and those who do know often abhor when thinking about the proprietary standards, which made it difficult to create and preserve the work. The CD-ROM Cabinet is an initiative of an enthusiastic small network of people who, experimentally and in a flexible way, look for viable ways to document and preserve a selection of these works. We look for methods outside of institutions, and for strategies that will ensure long-term accessibility. During a lecture at the RENEW conference, Sandra Fauconnier will explain what has been done so far in the course of this project (which runs from January till June 2013). The CD-ROM Cabinet is kindly supported by the Mondriaan Fund.