Just as writers may keep travel journals, artists often make scrapbooks of their journeys through a lifetime of research and experience. Each individual's personal collection of facts and artefacts, observations nad commentary, constitute the editorial content of an "artist's album".
George Legrady's An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War is closest in spirit and form to the personal travel diary of sights, sounds, words, and objects collected from his own family history and on location experiences. The cd-rom is an album in the static sense, interactively assembling fragmented elements and excerpts from his spiritual and geographical pilgrimage through the Cold War, thus "laying out" his digital exhibition.
Jayne Loader focuses on the popular cultural, social, and technical reactions to the atomic threat during the nuclear chill from an American perspective in Public Shelter. The cd-rom is a seemingly exhaustive archive of facts and facsimiles which extend even further beyond the found footage of the fifties featured in her film "The Atomic Cafe" in 1982. Even more meticulously than Antonio Muntadas with cases of censorship in his website/installation "The File Room", Jayne Loader uses the metaphor of apparently infinite rows of file cabinets containing nuclear-related documents from around the world and other "duck and cover" souvenirs from home. While the contents are entertainingly informative, the index is intriguingly thesauric, giving the archive an encyclopedic appeal by creating the illusion of endless textual, audio, visual, and audio-visual transcripts, snapshots, and recordings of anecdotes, statements, speeches, and other propaganda; all of the above is intertwined in the hypermedia album of a serious collector and an inspired artist.
Christine Tamblyn's Mistaken Identities is a personal tribute in honor, and in some cases, in defense of, ten female role-models and artists from western history, including Catherine the Great, Marie Curie, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Isadora Duncan, Frieda Kahlo, Marlene Dietrich, Simone de Beavoir. Her hyperlinked cd-album is an open book with a diversity of tables of contents on cleverly interfaced pages of portraits, photographs, puzzles, threads, dolls, dressing rooms, libraries, and TV sets which lead to a specific context of each woman's life. Christine Tamblyn introduces us to them all through an intimately artistic environment valorizing the works, writings, and memory of each one of her subjects.