Making contact with artful CD-ROMs

CD-ROMs have only seriously begun to surface on the art scene in the last few years. Paradoxically, CD-ROMs came into their own as an artful medium by using existing media and reconfiguring and articulating them together in new ways. One of the crucial moments of this articulation is the moment of interactivity, the moment during which these constitutive media are fundamentally disrupted. To discuss the reconfiguring and rearticulation of existing media in CD-ROM art, I have chosen a number of examples from Contact Zones: The Art of CD-ROM, a traveling exhibition curated by Timothy Murray of Cornell University. This exhibition, which is itself a landmark in the CD-ROM´s emergence as an art form, is impressive in its scale-more than 50 CD-ROMs from 18 countries. Until this exhibition reaches a venue near you, you can get a sense of its richness and the provocative questions it opens through its Web presence, http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/