Materializing Multimedia: pits, tracks and standards

The iconic multimedia applications of the turn of the 1990s—interactive encyclopedias, virtual museums, and multimedia companions, Myst, Encarta, and Microsoft Cinemania—all took tangible form in the CD-ROM, or more precisely, in the structured alternation of pits and lands on a optical disc surface. As a medium, the CD-ROM was neither self-sufficient nor content-specific—it relied on assemblages of hardware, middleware, and software to function. Yet, at the time, it was one of the few formats capable of storing and integrating multiple types of data—text, images, audio, and video—while offering 650 MB of storage when hard drives barely exceeded 40 MB.

This paper examines the CD-ROM both as a material artifact—with its affordances and constraints—and as a shifting technological standard that continuously (re)configured what constituted multimedia. By tracing the trajectory of CD-based formats as outlined in the Rainbow Books standards—from CD-Audio to CD-ROM, CD-i, and PhotoCD—we will explore how multimedia was progressively formalized through an interplay of storage capacity, interactivity, and cross-device compatibility.

Each CD-based format determined how different types of data were encoded, organized, and accessed, while also prescribing the specific hybrid analog-digital assemblages in which the disc would integrate, whether with television ecosystems, video game platforms, or other analog peripherals. Through these variations, each format subtly shaped the multimedia experience in relation to specific applications. Tracing the material (re)configurations of the CD formats, we seek to uncover the multiple trajectories, migrations and detours that complicate the often presumed linear and teleological transition from analog to digital.