Digital Books

The book arts expanded into virtual form with digital graphics and interactive software. From digital books to interactive art on CD-ROM, the physical collections of the Goldsen Archive complement the illuminated manuscripts, early modern printed books, and book arts in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. The top shelf celebrates one of Goldsen’s initial collaborators, the Anarchive Project of the University of Paris 1, directed by Professor Anne-Marie Duguet, an innovative integration of the traditional catalogue raisonné of living media artists with interactive platforms of new media art. The middle shelf exhibits diverse approaches to blending traditional book art forms with digital and interactive systems. On the bottom shelf are books integrating print and media, surrounded by artistic case covers of some CD-ROM art titles available on the adjacent iMacs and featured initially in the exhibition, Contact Zones: The Art of CD-ROM, hosted by the Cornell Library in 1999. Of special note is Vivaria.net’s collaboration with the monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe, and Rowan to type out by chance variants of the complete works of Shakespeare as they interacted with keyboards left in their zoological environment.

Beginning with holdings from Contact Zones, the Goldsen archive maintains one of the largest international archives of art on CD-ROM. In 2014, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Goldsen a $300,000 Preservation and Access Grant to conduct research on continued access to CD-ROMs threatened with extinction by obsolete computers and software.

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