Multimediarama

Multimedia has been hyped so heavily and unthinkingly in the 90s that it comes as no surprise to find we are now on the cusp of a CD-ROM backlash. Among early adopters (as ad agency researchers like to put it) there is a growing mood of disenchantment and a feeling that CD-ROMs have failed to deliver. The technology is ploddingly slow, the interfaces clumsy, the mainstream product-line banal, and who really wants to spend large chunks of their leisure time gawping at computer screens?

CD-ROMs do, of course, have their uses. The makers of encyclopaedias and other information products are rethinking the future of print with good reason. But art? A few months ago at the Royal College of Art I attended a packed screening of the Residents' Freakshow, regularly touted at that point by the computer press as one of the best CD-ROMs you could buy. Art and design students and teachers trooped into the viewing theatre with a real sense of anticipation, but the feeling afterwards was one of disappointment. The whole experience, from the stop-start momentum to the crudity of the animation compared to its cinematic equivalent was deemed to be neither seductive nor compelling.

So far, despite the ballyhoo, very few visual artists have produced CD-ROMs. The reviews pages of frieze have featured only one, the highly recommended Blam! by the New York-based digital satirists Necro Enema Amalgamated. Defiantly low-tech and aggressively non-interactive, it shows what the technology can achieve in the hands of independent media artists with guerrilla sensibilities and a lack of preconceptions. Another early exponent is Los Angeles painter Bill Barminski, creator, in the 80s, of the Situationist cartoon hero Tex Hitler. 'The important thing about CD-ROMs is that they're cheap enough to keep in the hands of individuals,' Barminski explained on Channel 4's Once Upon a Time in Cyberville. 'It's important to keep corporations from taking control and basically making everything bland in order to sell more.'

Barminski's Consumer Product CD-ROM (Consumer Productions, 1994) takes the archival approach and in that sense relates to a disc like Freakshow, which packs in punter-friendly back-catalogue details and pop promo snippets. As well as browsing Bill's catalogue raisonné - imaginatively animated - we can see him in interview, listen to LA critics and collectors singing his praises, leaf through his entire comic book output, watch him hanging a show, drop by for the opening, and read his cuttings file. I had mixed feelings about Barminski's rather obvious neo-Pop paintings; a typical example, Product Identification (1991), shows Christ crowned with thorns, with the slogan 'Time out for a refreshing Pepsi'. But while Consumer Product told me more about Barminski than I would ever have asked, it did it in a way that was engaging - on-screen icons take the form of bottles and packets - and nicely reflective of the popular culture that inspired him.

What Barminski's disc doesn't do, except in a rather clumsy animated sequence, is attempt to use the resources of the CD-ROM to create a new kind of art particular to the medium. Two recent discs tackle this problem in radically different ways. The aptly named Headcandy (Ion, 1994) is a collaboration between American video whizzkids Chris-topher Juul and Douglas Jipson, with music by Brian Eno. The basic idea, presented here as a discovery though it's as old as the Doctor Who title sequence, is to point a video camera at a TV screen. The resulting feedback, used to extraordinary effect in Headcandy, is what 2001 would have looked like if it had only consisted of the 'Star Gate' sequence. Cloudbursts of psychedelic colour rush towards you from some distant planetary horizon. Strange geometries replicate and fold in on themselves in feats of cosmic origami.

The only interaction involved in Headcandy lies in pulling down the blinds, donning a pair of prismatic spectacles (provided), selecting one of the five pieces for viewing, and keeping a straight face. Eno's track titles - 'Beast', 'Spunk Worship', 'Manila Envelope' - are red herrings. There is nothing concrete here, no ideas, just overwhelming visual sensation. Headcandy is a disco for your desktop and the most notable thing about it, ultimately, is that it longs to dissolve the distracting division between the hardware frame of the monitor and the space around it: standing well back, wearing the glasses, causes the central image to multiply around the screen. The wallpaper version will be fabulous.

Equally playful, though it comes much closer to the mood and conventions of gallery art, is The ToyBox (Moviola, 1995), released in association with Video Positive 95. Inside the box are 20 'toys', each by a different artist. A few achieve real resonance. With Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead's Thalamus you use your mouse to tune a kind of spirit radio. 'Do you know where you are going?' asks a medium. 'Heading for the sea,' replies a quiet voice. 'Do you have friends?' 'Dead.' And yet, in a way that has no obvious solution at this stage, the computer tends to domesticate the experience. A similar idea, installed in gallery conditions, could achieve a much greater control of atmosphere. Some ToyBox contributors confront the delivery medium's limitations by building the computer into the piece. Janni Perton's Squeezer turns your display into a conceptual fruit machine with pay-out noises and ironic punchlines ('fondle blissful supplication'), while Robert Mettler's System Decay invades your desktop and bugs you by repeatedly calling on a telephone icon ('Sorry, incoming calls only').

As The ToyBox's makers acknowledge, 'no one piece could be said to be definitive'. But the project offers enough imaginative variety to suggest that the CD-ROM has considerable untapped potential as a medium for artists. New ways of thinking about interface and content are exactly what is needed at this point to lift the medium from the doldrums and propel it to the next stage of development.