Sit back, dear reader, and imagine two kinds of writing. The readerly text makes you into a passive creature, receiving a predetermined meaning from the author. With a readerly text you accept the interpretation you're given, and learn to like it. The writerly text, on the other hand, makes you an active participant in the process of interpretation. It allows you to construct your meaning from the materials supplied you. It's the difference between oppression and empowerment, between product and production, or at least so said French cultural theorist Roland Barthes. Barthes was talking about books, and specifically the difference between 19th-century realist tomes (readerly, boo hiss) and playful post-structuralist ones (writerly, hooray!). Yet had he not made the serious theoretical error of walking under a Parisian milk-float in 1980, by now Le Professeur Barthes would probably have become a paid-up multimedia groupie. After all, what could be more "writerly" than interactivity ? With a CD-ROM, you're absorbed into a world you help construct, engaging with the experience, actively creating the meaning you extract from its myriad burnt-in grooves. Right ?
Wrong. British cultural theorists Blur once declared that "modern life is rubbish" and, at least when it comes to the CD-ROM, they were spot on. Most multimedia is unmitigatedly boring, a depressing fact if, like mine, a large part of your time is spent dealing with it, the people who make it and the people who hope to become rich on the back of it. Why is it so bad ? Simply because, despite the grandiose claims of developers, trade mags and corporate backers, most ROMs are readerly texts par excellence. Consider, dear reader, your glazed expression as you wait for some fat image file to be dragged into RAM. And witness that expression deepen as this file flashes lights, strobes 256 colours and generally does everything bar taking its meta-phorical clothes off in an attempt to grab your attention. Interactivity ? Nah. Nothing could actually be more passive. However high the production values, multimedia will be dull as ditch-water if you can't make the damn thing do something - and if it doesn't make you do something.
The problem is that though CD-ROMs can indeed do lots of things, at the moment their ability to do most of them is merely average. The video output isn't as good as your telly; the audio isn't as good as your hi-fi; the text isn't as good (or at least as usable) as the stack of magazines you keep by the bog. So the all-singing, all-dancing, super-duper ultra-ROM you just brought home will probably end up gathering dust behind your monitor unless it employs its capabilities to do something that couldn't be done in any other medium. It might be fun for a while, but unless it's an improvement on what you had before, why change ?
So what does do something that couldn't be done in any other medium ? Answer - AntiRom 2. The work of a London-based collective of multimedia designers, the name says it all. From first click to last, AntiRom 2 is about production rather than product. A cross between a sketchbook and a tool kit, it's a collection of multimedia doodles and interface ideas, all with an underground aesthetic and a raw energy which mean that AntiRom 2 is to most other ROMs what the Sex Pistols were to Yes.
With a breakbeat soundtrack by Underworld, and impeccably cool lo-fi graphics, AntiRom 2 looks and sounds great, but that's not the point. Designed with off-the-shelf tools, it packs absorbing multimedia into routines that, by and large, use less than 50K of memory. Photorealistic images, full-motion video and Quicktime VR don't in themselves make something interactive. Interactivity is about creating a space in which the user can do things. Watching an impressive effect is fine, but if the user's involvement is limited to a single mouse click, it's just the same old readerly experience.
The AntiRom 2 engines involve the user in simple, mostly abstract activities that use the "multi" aspect of multimedia to the full. For example, a still photo of an archetypal '50s nuclear family is overlaid with a group of black rings. Each ring controls a soundtrack - the TV, a cheesy popular song, the traumatised inner thoughts of the various family members as they sit together in supposedly idyllic unity. You can move the rings together to produce a breakdown-inducing cacophony, or concentrate on one track and let the others fade into faint murmurs. It says something sort of profound about isolation, about relationships, about the disjunction between inner life and communal life. And best of all, the mechanics of the engine don't intrude on the experience of using it. All technology aspires to be invisible, to allow the user to do something without being aware of the tools they're using to do it. So as a piece of art and a piece of technology, this little engine is supremely successful.
Another excellent routine involves a group of grubby, pulsating blobs, straight out of some experimental Czech animation. Throwing them around, much in the same way as in the nuclear family skit, allows you to remix the track in the background. The key thing is that it doesn't rest on the idea of a "virtual studio", or a "DJ-in-a-box", or any other external metaphor. This is a toy, and a toy that could only exist digitally. It places the user somewhere between musician and listener, making them an active participant in the music, and making this a quintessentially writerly text.
Like its predecessor, AntiRom 2 has been made on a shoestring. It contains no exclusive datasets, no impressive proprietary code, and seems rather pointless when compared to the current flood of games, "interactive movies", how-to manuals and educational aids. Yet for all its apparent lack of meaning and purpose, it makes most other multimedia look like the ill-considered flabby nonsense it is. AntiRom 2 has ideas. AntiRom 2 lets you join in, rather than watch. And I'd rather join in with a fun little idea than $10 million worth of dullness any day of the week. So, I reckon, would Roland Barthes (Contact AntiRom on (0171) 240 9282.)