The Antirom CD-rom was self-published and funded by the New Collaborations grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain. 1,000 CDs were pressed and given away free at a gallery launch at the Cameraworks Gallery in Bethnal Green London in March 1994
The Antirom art collective was formed in 1993 in London England. Influenced by movements such as Dada, Punk and the DiY ethos of House music and sound systems the group developed the antirom CD a “protest against ill-conceived point-and-click 3D interfaces grafted onto re-purposed old content – video, text, images, audio and so on – and repackaged as multimedia”.
Through a largely heuristic and iterative process of collective experimentation, in which original material as well as hacked, recorded, scanned, sampled images, code, sounds and film work, were shared amongst the group, reworked, adapted and combined. From this reservoir of material a loose collection of interactive artworks began to evolve and accumulate. The diverse body of work that emerged was an eclectic, absurd, critical and often comic collage audio visual experiments, small interactive sketches. The work whilst disparate in content and form shared a common ethos of exploring interactivity as a medium in its own right, rather than being a functional and often representational interface to existing media content such as films, audio and text.
As a final rejection of the orthodoxy of contemporary digital work and a commitment to immersion in the digital space as fundamentally non linear the group removed all traces of the traditional menu and navigation. Instead the group developed a minimalist all but non existent randomised navigation system. After starting the CD ROM, a piece of work would be randomly selected and loaded, the user had only three options, engage with the piece, choose to leave the piece by moving the cursor to the top of the screen where it would change to an arrow, upon which a new piece would be loaded at random, or quit the CD-rom altogether, by moving the cursor to the bottom of the screen where the cursor would turn into the Mac system crash icon. The CD had no overall file menu and no alternate form of navigation, so the user had no way of knowing how much or little of the work they had seen and each viewing was unique.
In the context of multimedia, at the time, this was a very different approach to the dominant “encyclopaedia” format such as Encarta. At this stage in the development of the multimedia industry, most titles were lavishly produced and funded by large organisations hoping to create a breakthrough product that generated a lot of sales. The Antirom CD took what were at the time innovative interaction techniques such as using the mouse to control bizarre sounds and animations of random lines and colours and created experiences that confounded, entertained and confused.
In his essay Cinema As A Cultural Interface (also a chapter in The Language of New Media), new media theorist, Lev Manovich, uses Antirom’s work in HotWired’s now defunct RGB Gallery to describe “how cultural interfaces stretch the definition of a page while mixing together its different historical forms”.[2]
Co-founders were Andy Cameron, Andy Allenson, Rob LeQuesne, Luke Pendrell, Sophie Pendrell, Andy Polaine, Nicolas Roope, Tom Roope, and Joe Stephenson.
Collaborative contributions to the Disc included work by: Underworld, Tomato and Sadie Plant.
The work on the CD Rom like much of the interactive work independently developed in the 1990’s became largely inaccessible in 2003 when Apple’s system upgrade to OSX rendered many works unplayable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antirom
Channel four news 1994 “The New Media”
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