Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Vinyl Record Albums = New Media


Turns out that Vinyl Video - the anachronistic late-90's media for low-fidelity, black and white video art (check out the amazing infomercial) - was lagging behind a small number of UK Pop Acts who built software into their 12" records.

"Most of these programs were written for the Sinclair Spectrum home computer series. The Sinclair Spectrum was a relatively cheap home computer system that used a television set as a monitor and loaded programs from tapes."

This article has an amazing recap of computer games built into records by the Thompson Twins, Information Society and The Freshies, and even has a few available for download.

The Spectrum's cassette medium also allowed for pirate radio stations in Eastern Europe to file-share simple programs by broadcasting the tones, which could be recorded by the software pirates of the communist era.

Also, since we're on a Vinyl Kick, 8-bit Game Hacker and Musician Cory Arcangel passes along a zine called "The Journal of Popular Noise," which puts out "issues" consisting of 7" records. I haven't heard them yet, but it's a cool idea.

No comments: