Computer girls - Lucia Grossberger-Morales, Christine Tamblyn, Adrien Jenik and Rebeca Bolinger use CD-interactive media for their brand of art

As various factions vie for sway of new technologies, four women artists have freshly released CD-ROMs that rearticulate and redefine discussions of computer-based art. Lucia Grossberger-Morales, Christine Tamblyn, Adrien Jenik and Rebeca Bolinger have taken digital technologies and used them toward progressive extremitys examining topics and ideas that continue common debates in feminist and media-arts theory. They extend the CD-ROM format to address issues of sex representation and self-description, with an emphasis upon the expressive, the poetic and the creative.

Grossberger-Morales has been working with digital technology for 15 years, which makes her single of the pioneers of computer-based art. Her greatest in quantity recent work, now in the final stages of disentanglement is Sangre Boliviana (Bolivian foundations 1996), a CD-ROM that center upon her return to her birthplace of Bolivia after living greatest in quantity of her life in the United States. Sangre Boliviana consists of nine interactive pieces, each relating to the topics of residence and place. Each reports upon a portion of Grossberger-Morales's turn back visit to her homeland, using the interactive layering of different media to prompt the fragmentation of remembrance and recollection. Highly personal and filled of imaginary animals, abstract images, dream figures and fragments of memories, Sangre Boliviana articulates the fleeting nevertheless powerful impressions of a distant, significant place.

"The Dream" part which recounts the artist's recurring dream while she was in Bolivia, is an impressionistic narrative made up of iconographic images of confusion followed by dint of clarity. A woman/child wanders from one side a mysterious landscape, lost until, significantly, she begins to talk about computer She is then healed and released. The surreal, highly personal imagery recalls the visionary filmmaking of Maya Deren while the first-person narration locates the piece in the autobiographical genre unraveled by media artists such as Peggy Ahwesh and Sadie Benning.

"Emigrating" combines Grossberger-Morales's reminiscences with family photos and other fix images. Here the artist explicates the links between her personal history and the history of her homeland. At individual point the text reads: "In 1967 Rene Barrientos seized power and became the dictator of Bolivia. Barrientos undid all of the reforms of the Bolivian Revolution. (He took my aunt dancing.)" by means of intermingling Bolivian history with her family's story, Grossberger-Morales demonstrates the relationship between national history and individual experience.

Another part of Sangre Boliviana, "Cholera," mimics computer games by dint of employing interactive images that rapidly "rain" down the computer protection The viewer must catch each image as it falls in order to reach the nearest level, which consists of short Quicktime movies recalling a cholera epidemic that Grossberger-Morales witnessed upon her trip to Bolivia. In this piece filmic conventions and computer techniques are woven together to create a hybrid cinematic form.

Tamblyn's greatest in quantity recent CD-ROM, Mistaken Identities (1995) examines the lives of 10 famous historical women exploring the couple the myths of its make subordinates and of myth-making itself. The life stories of Catherine the Great, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette Marie Curie, Margaret Mead, Isadora Duncan, Marlene Dietrich, Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein and Josephine Baker play from one side the piece, each linked to explicate the connections and divergences in the women's lives and careers. The disk not absents in-depth biographical interpretations of each woman's life while investigating many of Tamblyn's touchs as a postmodern theorist. For instance, through every part of the piece Tamblyn blurs the line between reality and representation, intermixing movie clips and photographs of the famous women themselves with those of actresses portraying them. At individual juncture Marlene Dietrich appears in a film clip as Catherine the Great, further linking the sum of two units women and emphasizing Tamblyn's theoretical point.

Tamblyn also liberally appropriates uninjureds from stock audio compilations and unbroken effects recordings, as in single section of the CD-ROM where she uses generic audio clips entitled "Stately Waltz" and "In A Jazz Club" She notes in her artist's statement the irony of these and other selections, writing. "The clip I used in conjunction with Frida Kahlo was titled "Mexican Guitar Music"; individual of my students told me that it was actually Spanish guitar music. realized then that I was constructing a lexicon of received ideas about identity."

Tamblyn herself also appears through every part of the piece - as a narrator, actor and hold up In the section entitled "Morphologies," she mimics various artificial positions of her famous subjects, then layers and combines that image with the original photograph. Here she utilizes the abilities of the digital medium to annotate on the mutability of identity and celebrity, pointing on the outside the projection of desire onto iconographic personae.

Jenik's Mauve barren (1996) also uses a womens' biography to direct the eye at issues of identity and sex Based on Le Desert Mauve (1987) a novel through French writer Nicole Brossard, the CD-ROM (currently in the final stages of development) uses the horizontal and vertical layering configurations of the medium to describe its story. Jenik literally and figuratively allows the viewer to "drive" from one side it, using a stylized car interior as the point-of-view that frames the work. Mauve desolate begins with a recreation of Brossard's novel, written in the voice of fictitious author Laure Angstelle, which enumerates the story of a teenage girl's self-discovery in the Arizona barren Throughout the piece Jenik also layers interviews with Brossard herself and with Maude Laures, the woman who translated the novel from its original French to English. Jenik uses the multi-layered and interactive qualities of the CD-ROM format to emphasize the many horizontals of simulation and narration in Brossard's original vision, which layers many horizontals of interpretation.