This one-hour non-linear documentary played on a loop in a booth at the center of the Whitney exhibition, allowing the soundtrack to leak throughout the show and create a connection among the visual art and the music and sounds of the era.
It was a big success. It sold over 10,000 copies, and stands as the first ever interactive museum catalogue.
Alongside texts and spoken-word by Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and others, it features snippets of recordings by Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, films by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, interactive art pieces and animations designed and created by Sue Coe, Gary Panter, Stephen Kroninger, Suzan Pitt, Kevin Kerslake, plus top-quality editing work by Hank Corwin and Bruce Ashley, and much besides.
A companion CD, “Offbeat”, was released (to raise money for AIDS research),featuring “contemporary tracks inspired by the Beats”, including this – a collaboration between the late great poet Amiri Baraka and DJ Spooky.
Thank you for sharing…✌🏽❤️
Such a stunning exhibition. Saw it in NYC in ’96,,and in San Francisco. I thought the NYC show was more cohesive. Also bought the catalogue, didn’t know there was a CD-rom.. But did buy a VHS tape. of the exhibition and used to show it to my class @ UC Berkeley.. So great to see this remarkable project resurface.
Had the CD-ROM (possibly still do somewhere!) and enjoyed it immensely. I would show it to friends, smoke some pot and interact with it, loving the images, music and words. I searched the CD-ROM out recently and found the video of someone going through it on YouTube recently. It still holds up! Tremendously well done. Glad I was one of the fortunate ones to experience this back in the late 1990s.