Pleroma

having fun documenting the mid- and early interactive movement

today's archival project is the companion for the book "In Your Face: The Best of Interactive interface Design". it is full of dozens of Director projectors highlighting award-winning websites, cd-roms, floppies and kiosks of the era.

most of the designs are fun, goofy and tactile

if you're feeling wistful for design, this is the cheapest time travel device money can buy 😅

disc image here - windows/mac:
https://archive.org/details/in_your_face_disc

@vga256 This is so cool. I miss the weird interactive shit that people did in the multimedia days.
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@MossRC myself as well. ideally i'd love to write a history of macromedia director some day - it gets far too little credit!

@vga256 It doesn't help that one of its creators is generally regarded as being a toxic, woman-harrassing dickhead (I can't speak to the truth of the rumours, but he wasn't exactly pleasant to deal with in my very-limited experience with the man). But I agree, and I'd love to read such a history.

At one point several years ago I actually thought about doing a history book on the golden age of multimedia; I eventually decided I wasn't the right person to write it.

@MossRC i'm a lot more interested in the folks who used the software to build multimedia projects. unfortunately, it's just too large of a territory to cover in a single book. managed to get a hold of one of the former Mackerel guys recently, and that history alone is worth retelling.

@vga256 Ooh, yes, they did some amazing stuff with the tech. (And yeah, the story of how Director was used is way more interesting than how/why it was made.) I've always wanted to read a deep dive into the work of Real World Multimedia, too

@MossRC ah haaa... i didn't realize they were behind xplora1 and had other projects! e.g. Ceremony of Innocence - i'm excited to try this out

@vga256 cool! I and @steveriggins probably worked on some of these at Voyager Co.

@octothorpe @steveriggins wild! were these Voyager Expanded books or the multimedia/doc CDs?

@vga256 @steveriggins mostly the latter. Hard Days Night, Painters Painting, Maus, Dazzleoids, etc. It’s been like 30 years, so I’m a little fuzzy.

@octothorpe @steveriggins incredible. those were standout titles in the 90s - Hard Days Night especially! Dazzleoids is news to me - looking forward to checking it out

did you ever work with colin holgate? had the opportunity to interview him about VEBs last year.

@vga256 @octothorpe Colin Holgate did Hard Days Night. I (along with a lot of other awesome people!) did Beethoven, Stravinsky, video and audio toolkits, baseball’s greatest hits, poetry in motion, the windows version of A Night to Remember…

@steveriggins @octothorpe very cool! i did not get a chance to talk to colin about HDN unfortunately - we spent most of our time talking about the early VEBs like Jurassic Park

i've been working with a group of archivists for the past few years to preserve as many of the Voyager titles as possible. the catalogue is massive!