Look! Look! Look! My friend Keith Knueven has created a new logo for this blog! Take a moment, visit his website TDOOKK.com, and then hire him, immediately, for all your projects — he’s great! Thank you Keith!!! When I started Inventing Interactive, at the beginning of the year, I had no posts planed and no idea of how long I’d do it. It’s hard to believe that, with this, I’ve done 119 posts. It’s been…
 
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In the mid 90′s there was a mini-boom for pop-music CD-ROMs. Unlike early titles from Voyager, which tended towards intellectual examinations of classical symphonies, these were moody, artistic, experiences. Strongly influenced by Myst, they let users move through virtual worlds, try to solve puzzles, and unlock special content. Their narratives may have been frustrating and unclear, but it was great to see artists experimenting with the medium. It’s easy to forget how slow computers were…
 
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When I was a kid I loved watching the 1970′s tv show Space: 1999. For some reason it was only on around 11 or 12 at night, and so I had to stay up late, which gave watching it a kind of other-worldly experience. A few months ago Sean Adams did a great post on the show’s fashions and interiors — and I’ve been meaning, since then, to post something on the show’s computer interactions….
 
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There’s no reason I can’t talk about my own projects on this blog, right? Just keep in mind that this story starts in 1999, when the web was mostly just html pages, some Director/Shockwave, a little Flash, and mostly dial-up modems. The social web didn’t yet exist. Napster was being sued by everyone. And the idea of selling music online was considered crazy. But lots of companies saw that something was about to happen and…
 
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Jodi.org may be best known for their web-based artworks, but I recently found these images and thought they’d be interesting to share. They’re from a Mac-based project done some time between 1998 and 1999. Much like how full-bleed photos on early Quokka websites caused a kind of freak-out when people saw them, Jodi.org’s early work generated a lot of unease. Users didn’t feel totally safe that these were “just” art pieces. The simulation of computer…
 
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Take a look at these photographs by Rosemarie Fiore. Each one takes a video game and captures one gameplay as a single exposure. It’s a fascinating way of looking at the overall mood of an interactive experience. Plus, they’re beautiful! The photos are all from 80′s games — played on Atari, Centuri, and Taito platforms. It’s interesting to see how the technical capabilities and limitations of the machines give the images such a particular feeling. Doing the…
 
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Back in 1998, when I first saw The Lair of the Marrow Monkey I was totally taken in. In an era of CD-ROMs which sequenced the user through mostly static screens, or of experimental works with seemingly random or chaotic interactions, Lair‘s merger of storytelling with focused interactivity was really special. And then, three years later, along came Chroma (2001), which took those ideas and advanced them to new heights. The work connected the interactive…
 
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With the fashion for full Flash websites slowly fading into history (or is it just that websites load faster now?), I was excited to discover Pretty Loaded. Launched in January 2009, the site is an archive, or museum, of one of the artifacts of those big Flash sites… the preloader, or “loading” screen. Once upon a time, in a land of sputtering dial-up connections, websites took ages to load. Folks yearned for the 100% mark….
 
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I remember a CD-ROM project from the 90s that was unlike almost else appearing at the time. An ambient fluid flow of images and film, mixed with a unusual collection of audio, it created the feeling of moving through an urban environment. You had only the vaguest feeling of control of it all — almost as if you were being pulled through the city. It was a dream-like kind of experience. The project was “Urban…
 
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Today, the source code to MacPaint was officially donated to the Computer History Museum and made available to the public. MacPaint was declared as “the best program ever written” at an event celebrating the Macintosh’s 20th anniversary, by Stanford University computer science professor Don Knuth. Written by Bill Atkinson, MacPaint was beautifully simple, like much early Mac software — but also full of innovations. Features like the lasso (with the marching ants), and its ability…
 
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