Webster Lewin (USA) is a film-maker who first got involved with multimedia in 1991, as part of the team that created IBM's "Illuminated Books and Manuscripts" and "Bill of Rights" programs.

"BAR-MIN-SKI: CONSUMER PRODUCT" is a multimedia CD-ROM which, true to its unique interactive format, enables the user to explore the realms of art, advertising and consumerism through the eyes of Los Angeles artist Bill Barminski.

After clicking past the opening video, you enter the main screen inhabited by floating illustrations of consumer products. From here you can enter any one of the six sections of the program. A jug called "Image Maze" will take you to a section where you can navigate through 170 of Barminski's sinister, subversive and humorous paintings. An illustration of a can labeled "Focus on Paintings" will allow you to enter a multimedia an gallery, where a selection of the paintings come to life in a variety of original ways. Click on the titles and you see the painting of the book cover and hear a page or two of it dramatized for your listening pleasure. A plastic bottle called "Art-0-RAMA" allows you to go to an art opening, see a painting from start to finish or flip through the artist's sketch book, among other things. Deeper in "Art-0-Rama", behind a postcard labeled "Greetings frum Texass", can be found over 500 pages of comic books done by Barminski in the early 8os, such as the underground hit "Tex Hitler, Fascist Gun in the West". Behind a cereal box called "Interviews" you can visit with the artist in his spacious two-car studio. This section will allow you to see an artist at work in his natural environment.

Behind another cereal box labeled "Subvert" can be found an interactive game where you become a crazed advertising executive trying to create the perfect billboard for one of two products, the upscale STINKNOT deodorant or the low class BLATTO beer. The advertisements are created by matching artwork with canned backgrounds and slogans obtained from such strange places as Slogan Babe Magazine and the Home Shopping Network. As you sit in your office, you can always slack off by listening to radio programs like the blow hard conservative "Blimp Rambo Show". The advent of the CD-ROM technology has allowed for the birth of a compelling and affordably produced form of expression with possibilities that are still only beginning to be explored. The goal of "BAR-MIN-SKI: CONSUMER PRODUCT" is to combine elements of all the media that has come before, yet fundamentally altered the nature of engagement between the work and its audience.

Technical Background

HW: Macintosh
SW: Quicktime