An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War is an interactive CD-ROM and a computer media artwork installation project that features early 1950s East European personal and official Communist material in the form of home movies, video footage of Eastern European places and events, objects, books, family documents, socialist propaganda, money, sound recordings, news reports, identity cards, etc. These are part of the collection of Cold War-related artifacts and stories that I have been gathering during the last twenty years. The CD-ROM╒s contents, encompasing over sixty stories, have been arranged thematically in eight rooms superimposed on the original floor plan of the former Workers╒ Movement (Propaganda) Museum in Budapest, the original holdings of which have been in permanent storage since 1990. An Anecdoted Archive reflects my particular history as it relates to the Cold War. Archive is published as a CD-ROM for the Mac environment. Cost to individuals $65, institutions $120.
About the Author:
Born in Budapest in 1950, near the end of the Stalin era, George Legrady emigrated to Canada during the1956 Hungarian revolution. Since 1981 he has been a resident of California. Mr. Legrady is associate professor of information arts/conceptual design at San Francisco State University, a program that integrates cultural theory and emerging technologies in the context of conceptual art and contemporary art practice.
Awards in 1994 include Voyager╒s New Voices/New Visions prize for An Anecdoted Archive, which also received an honorable mention at Ars Electronica ╒94 (Linz, Austria), a National Endowment for the Arts artist fellowship, and a Canada Council computer-aided media grant. Computer-based installation artworks exhibited internationally in 1994 include Artifices III (Saint-Denis, France); les hypermÄdias, Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France); ISEA ╒94, Helskinki Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki, Finland); Ars Electronica ╒94, Landesmuseum (Linz, Austria); [the clearing], New Langton Arts Gallery (San Francisco, California); Iterations: The Digital Image, MONTAGE ╒93 & International Center of Photography (New York, New York).
