Computer girls.

As various factions vie for control of new technologies, four women artists have recently released CD-ROMs that rearticulate and redefine discussions of computer-based art. Lucia Grossberger-Morales, Christine Tamblyn, Adrien Jenik and Rebeca Bolinger have taken digital technologies and used them toward progressive ends, examining topics and ideas that continue current debates in feminist and media-arts theory. They deploy the CD-ROM format to address issues of gender, representation and self-description, with an emphasis on the expressive, the poetic and the creative.

Grossberger-Morales has been working with digital technology for 15 years, which makes her one of the pioneers of computer-based art. Her most recent work, now in the final stages of development, is Sangre Boliviana (Bolivian Roots, 1996), a CD-ROM that centers on her return to her birthplace of Bolivia after living most of her life in the United States. Sangre Boliviana consists of nine interactive pieces, each relating to the topics of home and place. Each reports on a portion of Grossberger-Morales's return visit to her homeland, using the interactive layering of different media to suggest the fragmentation of remembrance and recollection. Highly personal and full of imaginary animals, abstract images, dream figures and fragments of memories, Sangre Boliviana articulates the fleeting yet powerful impressions of a distant, significant place.

"The Dream" segment, which recounts the artist's recurring dream while she was in Bolivia, is an impressionistic narrative made up of iconographic images of confusion followed by clarity. A woman/child wanders through a mysterious landscape, lost until, significantly, she begins to talk about computers. She is then healed and released. The surreal, highly personal imagery recalls the visionary filmmaking of Maya Deren, while the first-person narration locates the piece in the autobiographical genre developed by media artists such as Peggy Ahwesh and Sadie Benning.

"Emigrating" combines Grossberger-Morales's reminiscences with family photos and other found images. Here the artist explicates the links between her personal history and the history of her homeland. At one point the text reads: "In 1967 Rene Barrientos seized power and became the dictator of Bolivia. Barrientos undid all of the reforms of the Bolivian Revolution. (He took my aunt dancing.)" By intermingling Bolivian history with her family's story, Grossberger-Morales demonstrates the relationship between national history and individual experience.

Another segment of Sangre Boliviana, "Cholera," mimics computer games by employing interactive images that rapidly "rain" down the computer screen. The viewer must catch each image as it falls in order to reach the next level, which consists of short Quicktime movies recalling a cholera epidemic that Grossberger-Morales witnessed on her trip to Bolivia. In this piece filmic conventions and computer techniques are woven together to create a hybrid cinematic form.

Tamblyn's most recent CD-ROM, Mistaken Identities (1995), examines the lives of 10 famous historical women, exploring both the myths of its subjects and of myth-making itself. The life stories of Catherine the Great, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Marie Curie, Margaret Mead, Isadora Duncan, Marlene Dietrich, Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein and Josephine Baker play through the piece, each linked to explicate the connections and divergences in the women's lives and careers. The disk presents in-depth biographical interpretations of each woman's life while investigating many of Tamblyn's concerns as a postmodern theorist. For instance, throughout the piece Tamblyn blurs the line between reality and representation, intermixing movie clips and photographs of the famous women themselves with those of actresses portraying them. At one juncture Marlene Dietrich appears in a film clip as Catherine the Great, further linking the two women and emphasizing Tamblyn's theoretical point.

Tamblyn also liberally appropriates sounds from stock audio compilations and sound effects recordings, as in one section of the CD-ROM where she uses generic audio clips entitled "Stately Waltz" and "In A Jazz Club." She notes in her artist's statement the irony of these and other selections, writing. "The clip I used in conjunction with Frida Kahlo was titled "Mexican Guitar Music"; one of my students told me that it was actually Spanish guitar music. realized then that I was constructing a lexicon of received ideas about identity."

Tamblyn herself also appears throughout the piece - as a narrator, actor and prop. In the section entitled "Morphologies," she mimics various poses of her famous subjects, then layers and combines that image with the original photograph. Here she utilizes the abilities of the digital medium to comment on the mutability of identity and celebrity, pointing out the projection of desire onto iconographic personae.

Jenik's Mauve Desert (1996) also uses a womens' biography to look at issues of identity and gender. Based on Le Desert Mauve (1987), a novel by French writer Nicole Brossard, the CD-ROM (currently in the final stages of development) uses the horizontal and vertical layering structures of the medium to recount its story. Jenik literally and figuratively allows the viewer to "drive" through it, using a stylized car interior as the point-of-view that frames the work. Mauve Desert begins with a recreation of Brossard's novel, written in the voice of fictitious author Laure Angstelle, which tells the story of a teenage girl's self-discovery in the Arizona desert. Throughout the piece Jenik also layers interviews with Brossard herself and with Maude Laures, the woman who translated the novel from its original French to English. Jenik uses the multi-layered and interactive qualities of the CD-ROM format to emphasize the many levels of simulation and narration in Brossard's original vision, which layers many levels of interpretation.

Bolinger's CD-ROM Dorothy's Room (1995) more formally examines the capabilities of the medium, using the new Quicktime VR program to explore issues of perception and space. The meaning of the disk's title is twofold: it refers first to Dorothy Draper, the designer of the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel, who created the rouge interior of the famous hotel in the 1940s that is the setting for Bolinger's CD-ROM. The title also suggests Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz as the character moves through and explores an unfamiliar, imaginary space.

The viewer navigates through images of the Fairmont's luxuriously appointed lobby using virtual reality software that allows the viewer to pan, tilt and zoom into images of the room. Although there is no "payoff" at the end of the search, the viewer has the experience of controlling the navigation of the represented space in any detail he or she desires. Originally exhibited as a component of an installation that included a swatch of the Fairmont's carpeting and large-scale digital images, the piece suggests the relationship between actual and virtual space and the implications of their interaction.

Bolinger also draws interesting parallels between the historic and contemporary aesthetic issues found in her subject matter. In accompanying notes she points out the connection between Draper's original 1940s design and today's digital imaging, stating, "The patterned carpet . . . evokes an ever-repeating fractal image and the exaggerated details of the room . . . appear to have been already rendered for a computer gaming environment." Her wry observation moves this CD-ROM beyond formal investigations into a more conceptual and theoretical realm.

Amidst the continued cacophonous debate over ownership and control of new technologies, these women demonstrate that, given sufficient resources and support, artists are managing to create challenging, innovative computer-based artwork, If digital imaging is to have a more significant purpose than marketing entertainment, artists must continue to define and articulate its conventions and practices. The recent work of Grossberger-Morales, Tamblyn, Jenik and Bolinger is a step toward more meaningful and demanding uses for the CD-ROM medium, and it bodes well for the field of computer-based art.

VALERIE SOE is a writer and artist living in San Francisco.