[JH] Hackers & Slackers

Editor’s Note: This excerpt from Hackers & Slackers: The New York New Media Underground in the Early 1990’s is printed with permission from the author.

Remember Myst? That gentle, contemplative CD-ROM game set on a beautiful island? It came out in September 1993, right when I started at ITP. And everybody raved about it — how it pushed the boundaries of digital media, was wonderfully crafted down to the tiniest detail, broke with the conventions of CD-ROMs, such as they were.

Well, Blam! came out at the same time. Blam! was the opposite of Myst.

Yet interestingly, people were saying the same things about Blam! — raving about its technical brilliance, how it pushed the limits of digital media. I’d asked Jaime Levy what products she liked besides her own, and she replied, “I like Blam!, and that’s about it.” At the Voyager open house, Ashton Applewhite told me, “I think it’s fabulous. It’s, graphically, not like anything I’ve seen on a computer, that’s for sure.”

What Blam! did so cleverly was to illustrate its audio, including rants and interviews as well as stock sounds like the gunshot heard on startup, with clip art drawings animated at machine-gun pace. Little penises dancing across the screen, religious iconography strobing black and white, vintage porn flashing fleetingly or shown full-on. It went far beyond TV, even MTV.

It wasn’t a traditional publication either, for although is relied strongly on words, typography received the same treatment as imagery. In this it was similar to what Jaime Levy had done in Ambulance, insofar as it was black-and-white text set in motion. But Blam! pushed it further, louder and faster — to the very limits of legibility. But not beyond; through repetition, high volume, and rapid-fire alternation of text and image, it force-fed its message. However much you objected to the content, you had to admire the technique, how rapid-fire editing transformed such simple elements into something so powerful.

And if you looked beyond the flashiness, it actually adhered to — indeed pioneered — good interface design principles. The screens listing the contents were set in static, clean, modernist type, balanced with an archaic, gothic typeface; together they reflected the mix of substantive and anarchic content within.

Navigating from screen to screen within each article turned out to be simple and intuitive, once you figured it out — the screen was simply divided into thirds; clicking anywhere on the right side went forward; on the left, back; and in the middle brought you back to the contents screen.

More generally, Blam! transformed the practice of interacting with published content into a visceral experience that suited the new digital medium—not quite like television, but something maybe between radio and a videogame.

One thing it wasn’t was interactive, and in this it was deliberate and aggressive. Bob Stein politely called it “performative publishing.” And he was right — the pieces had more punch as performance than as interactivity. In fact, that simple navigation didn’t work once you chose an article; you were locked into it, and couldn’t get back to the contents screen until it finished. If you tried, you might either crash your computer, or be subjected to the punishment of having to sit through an additional, long and loud rant. In some pieces you had to click on particular anatomical features to move forward. Interactive indeed.