AntiRom
Andy Cameron, GB 1995
AntiRom - the antidote to multy-mediocrity
AntiRom is an fine art CD-rom for Macintosh computer created by the SASS collective in London and funded by the Arts Council.
The artist-engineers of SASS are: Andy Cameron, Rob Le Quesne, Sophie Pendrell, Andy Polaine, Thomas Roope and Joe Stephenson.
The Antidote
AntiRom offers a radical critique of the poverty of contemporary multimedia in a number of savagely ironic, absurdist and incinsive satires. AntiRom is specifically against the ill-conceived grafting of point-and-click functions onto traditional linear forms. AntiRom is for the development of a new language of representation, and new modes of spectatorship wihin the new machinery of interactivity.
The position is formed by the considerable experience of members of the team within the emerging interactive media industry. The team hopes that AntiRom will be a catalyst for others to develop interactve art practices beyond the exis-ting paradigm and explore the radical new opportunities offered by interactive tools. To that end the team intends to distribute AntiRom as a free Macintoch CD-rom with no copyright restrictions to as wide an audience as possible.
Ambient Interactivity
AntiRom offers a new paradigm of interactive media-ambient activities, circular, ritual, without closure, pregnant with sense, hard to sum up. The central issue within interactive representation is a guestion of meaning - how does interactivity signify? AntiRom is a response to this question and a step in the development of new strategies of art practice in interactive media. The paradox is that this essentially modernist project - the search for a language appropriate to the medium - is conducted with the quintessentially post-modern device, the digital computer. AntiRom recognizes that interactivity involves specific tools and specific techniques and that these must be used appropriately and with a sense of their real potential. Technology here is not avoided or fetishised, but confronted and put to work.
AntiRom is a cluster of randomly accessed audio-visual engines including:
Soundspaces-pre-packed, shrink-wrapped bricolage-ready-made tool boxes for IJs (interactve jockeys). Sondspace engines supports a wide range of audio data and a number of variations are offered on the CD-rom-ambient sound, atmospheric sound, musical loops, the spoken word and combinations of all these.
Screen Theory takes unpublished writing by Sadie Plant and Nick Land ad re-configures them as interactive video-texts across which the reader can play. Cyber-feminisation looks at the relation between women, femininity and virtuality, and Termination argues for an understanding of modernity as cybernetic construct.
Virtual Nightout - your goals is to get into one of 5 West End nightclus, but the bouncers do't like your face. Shot on location in London's West End, Virtual Nightout re-casts the hype of multimedia, virtual reality and cyberspace in terms of real issues of access,fantasy, desire and disapointment.
Underground - British dance band Underworld and Jason Kedgley of Tomato collaborate to create an audio visual loop merging typography and dance music to generate an automatic music video.
Equisite Corpse - a digital oracle based on the Surrealist scissor and paste game which combines fragments of theory, proverbs,common sense and urban myth to produce random cliches, sophisms, slogans -and profound truths. A World Wide Web version of Exquisite Corps is avail-able as:
http://www.wmin.acuk/media/HRC/.
If your browser supports forms you can add your own proverbs to the list.