DREAM KITCHEN by Leon Cmielewski and Josphine Starrs, may start as an antiseptically clean kitchen but quickly becomes contaminated by our very presence.  The more time we look about, the dirtier the kitchen and its crooks and crannies become.  Beneath the surface runs a parallel interior zone populated by inspirited objects, cyphers for human relationships.  The kitchen is a metaphor for world of entropy, constantly under surveillance and a sordid catalogue of dread.  This is a superbly engineered place with 3d and stop motion techniques. 

Hugo Glendenning and Forced Entertainment's Frozen Palaces uses a series of scenes playing in a deserted house and an urban landscape, where time has stopped still.  Frozen Palaces is an exploration of how place, identity and the imagination interact; about how place might both influence and archive dreams and events. It is the creation of a fictitious history - an overwriting of a real house with photographs of strange events that have never 'really' taken place.  This is a dark world suggesting sinister goings on and deeper psychological sub-texts. They have used the CD Rom as a storage device for the documentation of a performed work (Forced Entertainment are one of England's leading contemporary performance companies). 

David Bickerstaff, using a 'game' format as metaphor, BITBLOOD BABY deals with questions of genetic intervention by creating a hypothetical system for baby construction, a machine to make identities.  Limited choices and basic interacitivity are used with humour the 'player' can select identities and personalities for a virtual baby. This is play genetic engineering for beginners.  The human and intellectual components that can be assembled and named (branded as in the copyrighting of any DNA material) raise serious issues around race and identity.

 Zoe Beloff was approached by New York based performance company the Wooster Group to create a new interpretation of existing stage work. WHERE WHERE THERE THERE WHERE exists purely in the virtual realm now, yet the process by which it was arrived is inspired by and mirrors the content of the play, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. It is a complex work that makes links between language process, perception and environment.  Drawing links between different disciplines this an ambitious work. Beloff writes "1938, the date that Stein wrote DOCTOR FAUSTUS, was a time of transition between the old analog world and the birth of the digital realm and it is this transition that I wanted to be reflected in the work itself in the sense of both finding a contemporary formal equivalent in digital media for the radical restructuring of language performed by Stein's text, as well as a playful philosophical investigation of the relationship between electricity, logic and language games that her work inspires. ...

....My project does not describe or illustrate these ideas but attempts to very literally show them at work within the structure of the CD Rom. My idea was to demonstrate that within the world I create, what appears as the most realistic is  in fact only the most sophisticated level of artifice. Using Quicktime VR Panoramas and movies, I attempted to find a visual equivalent of the transition from 19th century industrial mechanics to 20th century computer architecture."

 Harriet McDougall's SONGSTER  is a transparent investigation and presentation of birdsong and language.  The song of the skylark is complex; a bird can often sing, in mid-air, continuously for up to 5 minutes. The rhythm patterns built up within the song are recognisable but the bird constantly shifts, adapts and reforms them in phrases of infinite variety. The structure and design of this interactive piece enables the viewer to examine the patterns within the song cycle of a particular bird. Using simple analytical systems devised by the artist, the viewer can effectively decode the song, discovering that beneath its complex structure are clear and simple rhythmic sequences. In being able to reorder, adapt and repeat different formations of one particular rhythm sequence, the viewer takes part in creating a new piece of work which embodies the idea of theme and variation in music and the visual arts; and in animal communication. A simple numeric sequence can be elaborated on, stage by stage, to develop sound and image formations of endless variety and complexity.

 The screen based interface has obvious limitations.  Who wants to sit in front of a screen for any longer than necessary these days when most people's work involves the same ?  keystrokes and mouse movement have been challenged in two works that of IMPALPABILITY  by Masaki Fujihata who invites 'the user' to lift the mouse off the table and make a visceral connection between the ball and the computer generated image on the screen. Detailed images of sections of human skin form the surface of a ball which the viewer can rotate at will by manipulating the mouse. The abstract yet physical/sensorial impression roused by the ball disturbingly raises the question of what, exactly, one is touching mouse or image? Image or flesh? (Impalpability and Frozen Palaces form part of artintact 5 published by zkm).

 William Burroughs coined the expression "Image is Virus" in his novel the Job.

 Is OS99,  the work of Jodi,  a virus ? or is it an artwork playing at being a virus ?  Private and what is public, what is local and what is supranational (global).  lays at looking like a virus itself. Code falling across the screen, a de-constructive play on code. Although increasing numbers of artists, designers and advertisers have since appropriated the re use of dialogue boxes, artificial crashes and computer self referentialsim Jodi was the first with his web sites dating back at least five years and forming part of a movement with other interventionist/network artists such as Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker, Vuk Cosik and Alexi Shulgin.  (If they made CD Roms I might have included them). Jodi is abstract art for computers. Code is the landscape.  In their work, content has been completely subordinated to aggressive visuals. Focusing specifically on those moments where computers break down (the crash, the bug, the glitch). OSS has the ability to mimic a computer operating system. Once launched, OSS hijacks the computer and forbids it from functioning normally. Like an operating system, OSS controls the appearance and functionality of the entire visual environment including desktop and pull-down menus. Within this counter-intuitive (if not frightening) interface, OSS presents the user with a series of abstract, computer-based aesthetic experiences, many of which continue the chaotic, "computer virus" style seen at the Jodi web site (http://www.jodi.org). Using CD-ROM however, Jodi is able to obtain a much more immersive effect. Images and shapes take over the entire screen, not simply within an internet browser window.

 PHONEY TELEFONICA, by Daniel Garcia Andujar (Technologies to the people), references automated surveillance systems and mimics identification protocols providing a proactive CD giving the viewer access to a number of software and tools for hacking, downloading a contaminator now for sniffing out network connections and spamming corporates of your choice.