| dc.description.abstract | The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical and critical review of some of the pioneering productions of interactive multimedia that were created at the MIDECIANT´s laboratories of the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) in Cuenca since 1994. Media Art creations that have not been considered by the historiographical studies, although they did emerge some of the first languages, processes and discursive forms of artistic creation using the digital technologies of the moment, breaking with the traditional Aristotelian´s narrative structure and being the seed of current hypertext.
To undertake the review of those pioneering proposals founded on interactive digital representation and determined by the first software characteristics for multimedia production, as Director and its Lingo programming language, it has been used the media archaeology methodology. These creations set some of the first digital graphic languages and media aesthetic, proposing new ways of navigating around the content, the appearance of arborescent indices, from the emerging new website design aesthetic and computer graphics techniques or the size files that never exceed 650 MB to be stored on different medias as the CD-ROM was. These productions contemplated inherent aspects in the current art, as the concept of hypertext or opera aperta, which were raised in some of the experimental literary works during the second half of the last century.
The International Museum of Electrographic Artworks – Innovation Center for Art and New Technologies (MIDECIANT) of Cuenca is an institution that depends on the UCLM and it is made up of its students, professors and researchers, as well as temporary invited residents through its Residency Program and the achievement of research projects. Some of those first interactive multimedia applications of art history were created in this museum-center, parallel to those developed in international centers twinned with Cuenca, such as the ZKM, whose most relevant productions were reported through the Artintact art magazine produced in CD-ROM format since 1994. In the case of the MIDECANT’s productions, these were created by some of the members of the different center´s team and through some artistic residences, financed by the support of several regional, national and international R & D projects and collaboration agreements with multinational companies such as Canon, Apple or Epson. All this allowed the functional autonomy of this center organized as a Medialab, being able to have all these new technologies from these multinational companies that were not only financing, but providing additional new resources.
From the result of this analysis, following the propitiated methodology by the Media Art Histories, and exemplified in this proposal by the creations which were produced in this center, emphasizing the innovations in discursive, formal and techno-expressive aspects, the interactive navigation, the digital iconography, the hypermedia script or the interface design, it is hoped to obtain the necessary historiographic justifications based on rigorous theoretical-critical studies that would allow the reconstruction of the prehistory of hypermedia narratives. | |
