A Mute Magazine talk

As the global ruling class finally admits that the 'financial' crisis has spilt over into the real economy, the fiction that the credit crunch is containable has been dispelled. Will resistance to capital's genocidal expansion now become equally uncontainable? Can anti-capitalists take advantage of the global system's instability, or will austerity measures and gloves-off geopolitics triumph?

IntrODuction 

This paper comes largely out of our experience in the production of the hyperactive electronic zine I/O/D. So firstly then, we should explain what I/O/D might be. Technically it is a Macromedia Director Projector with associated files that is small enough to be compressed onto one High Density disk.

I went to the Poussin show at the Royal Academy. He is our first interactive artist. Totally contemporary, as if he is about to burst onto the New York art scene tomorrow. Our present art and design understanding owes a lot to him. Poussin painted fairly small paintings. If you think of videos, films and commercials on t.v. and then think of the epics that such a small size screen can show then Poussin starts to make sense. In viewing each painting I was reminded of my wanderings through an arcade flashing with computer graphics on monitors.

Milo Garcia Makes Stupid Machines

During the 1980's Dr. Jacques Benveniste, an immunologist and medical researcher, performed a series of experiments designed to ascertain the medicinal efficacy of homeopathic remedies. At the time, it was widely believed by the medical establishment that any curative powers associated with such remedies were directly attributable to the placebo effect.

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For all you readers new to mute (all of you I guess) this bit is the Computerised Entertainment Appraisal Section where I'll be taking you through the fairly good and the little bit better of current computer games In response to no letters and the fact that you poor Apple supporters out there have little in the way of games support, this issue kicks-off with review of four action/adventure games for the Macintosh: 7th Guest, Midnight Stranger, Return to Zork and the almost ubiquitous Myst. So plug in, copy the contents to your system folder and chill out.

In the musical underground there has always been an emphasis on the bold and the new. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of club visuals, which in the space of a few years have moved from day-glo backdrop to feature presentation, bursting out of the club arena, into advertising, into CD-I, and into our living rooms. Film, video, photography, digital technology; all contribute to the overall effect; all combine to create the perfect club, and out-of club environment.

The Game as Art, and the use of the Computer in its Realisation, Development and Promotion.

Someone, not considered worthy of inclusion in the Digital Dictionary of Quotations on my system, once described Chess as a work of art that every time he played, he saw from a different angle.

Image: Modeled by Daniel Jackson, Assistant Modeler Tina Spear, Syling Simon Worthington & Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Models Sonic & Tails of Sega. Shot in Cyberspace.

A constant criticism of computer games is they have become a means of escape from reality. We are, it is claimed, near to being able to create virtual worlds -havens to hide ourselves away in, avoiding the real world. The great fear of many a parent is that their child will spend all his or her spare time separated from social contact and the challenges of the real world. Of course, each generation defends its own media, that of its childhood, and attacks that of its own children.

A telephone interview with Scanner - musician, composer, performance artist...

When you include segments from your scanned and taped conversations, are selections random or are specific selections made and the topic of conversations chosen to illustrate your own particular concerns? 

The revolution in TV communication is already here. The once humble TV capable of a simple one-way delivery of information has developed into a sophisticated 2-way interactive medium. But how many people out there have noticed? More importantly how many have benefited?

Produced as an antidote to, and critique of the banality of much contempora: multi-media, "anti-rom" is a collection of randomly accessible interactive pies( stored on CD-rom.

Created by "sass", Andy Cameron, Rob le Quesne, Joe Stephenson, Andy Polaine, Luke Pendrell, Sophie Pendrell and Tom Roope, Anti-rom has been created to instigate and invite further investigations into new and more appropriate languages of representation for interactivity.

An Interview with Games Developer Andy Blazdell

You make games with central characters that seem defiantly anti-heroic; is this to make them more realistic, or to increase levels of empathy for a wider variety of people/players?

an online conversation with ^'Splotch' - the artificial therapist

Script started on Tue Jan 17 12:31:30 1995

burns% ./chat

Hello! Let's chat

>Yes, I need to talk to you

you have to, or you want to?

>I want to talk to someone

why do you want to talk to someone?

>I want to share something with you what else do you want?

>I ask the questions

why do you ask the questions?