For those who didn't have the opportunity to visit the "RINGS: Five Passions
in World Art" exhibition at Atlanta's High Museum of Art this summer, the
latest multimedia production from Calliope Media will take you into the 1996
Olympic Arts Festival's centerpiece. Opened from July 4 through September 29,
the RINGS exhibition gathered over 120 art pieces symbolizing universal human
emotions to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Modern Olympics. Organized
into five rings that represent each of the five emotions (love, anguish,
awe, triumph and joy), the interactive CD-ROM features over one hundred works
of art ranging from paintings to sculptures, originating from various museums
and private collections throughout the world. Designed by interactive artists
Jim Gasperini and Tennessee Rice Dixon, RINGS is unlike most other
multimedia titles which simply put pictures, videos and sounds together
related to a common subject. Au contraire, RINGS is a true artistic
experience that not only sensitize senses but also the imagination.
At the beginning of RINGS are five video and audio introductions from
J. Carter Brown, RINGS exhibition director and director emeritus of the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and Ned Rifkin, Director of the
High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Beyond the general introduction to the
exhibition, these presentations will remind you of the ancient Olympic games
and their cultural legacy through a brief lesson of history. You will also
learn about the passionate Baron Pierre de Coubertin who devoted his entire
life to promote his ideal that he called Olympism, and renovate the ancient
games to their present day form. Of course, you are not obliged to watch them,
and if you prefer to jump in the exhibition itself, it's only at a click away.
As a matter of fact, the RINGS' interface will liberate the user from clicking
abusively on the mouse buttons while navigating through the different screens.
Most of the time, selections are made just by passing the mouse icon over
a specific region of the screen or by clicking the left mouse button once.
Difficult to imagine something easier indeed!
From the introductory screen, you can choose which ring you want to first visit
by clicking in the center of the concentric circles. According to the color
of the ring icon at that particular moment, you enter into one of the
exhibition's parts. The same way the five colored Olympic rings represent each
a part of the world, in RINGS they symbolize five emotions that are
universally expressed by humans, whatsoever the differences that may exist
between races. Thus red stands for love, violet for anguish, blue for
awe, yellow for triumph and green for joy. If you worry about your memory
not remembering the color code, the question mark in the upper right
corner of the screen will provide you with a legend and all the necessary help
to easily navigate throughout the program.
As you enter in one of the five main sections, you will discover a circular
window with a segmented colored ring. From this point, you can select
a particular object by moving your cursor over the ring sections which will
change the work of art in the center of the window. With each object comes
a brief description on the right part of the screen, supplying the object's title,
date of creation and artist's name. Clicking directly on the ring's segment
that corresponds to the object, will bring commentaries of J. Carter Brown
on that object, while clicking either on the text description or on the work
itself will provide you with more details. Comments were written by dozens of
different contributors from universities and museums across the country, and
provide users with the history and artistic context in which the work was
created. Furthermore, users may take a closer look at the work through zooming
possibilities to examine more details.
Each section of the exhibition features two, three or four animations called
"Passion Plays" reflecting the possible forms of an emotion. With awe for
example, there are three presentations with works grouped in three categories:
Awe of the Supernatural, Awe of the Natural and Transcendental Awe. The
audio-visual presentations feature artistic effects with morphing and other
visual transitions. Poems of different epochs and cultures ranging from
Rimbaud, Ovid and Neruda to the Chinese Li Po and the sacred texts of the
Indian Sanskrit, accompany the Passion Plays while delivering a message that
provokes an emotion.
One interesting feature of RINGS is the map origins pointing at the geographical
location where the work is originating from. You can easily access this feature
by clicking on the map icon that appears when you selected one work. You
will be presented with one of the nine regional maps covering the entire globe
from North America to Oceania, and you can switch from one area to another just
by clicking on the icon representing that part of the world. On the maps, the
numerous locations are represented by colored dots which, using the same color
code mentioned earlier, also indicate to which emotion the work belongs. As you
travel around the world and move the cursor over the locations, each work of
art will be displayed with a reduced size in a small window placed at the upper
right corner of the screen. Should you want to learn more about it, you just
need to click on the small window.
Written by Frederick Claude
Click here for screen shots.
IBM-PC compatible computer with a 486-66 Mhz or faster processor,
Min 8Mb memory,
Microsoft Windows 3.1 or higher,
Hard drive required with at least 14Mb free,
Double speed CD-ROM drive or faster,
256-color 640x480 pixel Super VGA display,
Microsoft compatible mouse.
8-bit MPC compatible sound card and speakers.
Macintosh
25 Mhz 68040 processor or faster,
6.3 Mb available RAM (PowerMacintosh: 8Mb available RAM),
256-color 640x480 pixel display,
Double speed CD-ROM drive or faster,
System 7 or higher.
Calliope Media,
1526 Cloverfield Blvd.,
Santa Monica, CA, 90404-3502.
| Technical Support: | 510-927-3906 Between 8:00am and 6:00pm PST |
Web site: Calliope Media
Distributors
In North America:
Maxis,
2 Theatre Square,
Orinda, CA 94563-3346
| BBS Support: | 510-254-3869 |
| Order line: | 800-336-2947 in the US |
| 1-510-933-5630 outside the US |
Web site: Maxis
In Europe:
In UK:
Maxis UK Ltd.,
18-20 St.John Street,
London EC1M 4AY.
| Technical Support: | +44-(0)171-250-0215 |
| Fax Support: | +44-(0)171-490-2177 |
| Graphics: | 89% |
| Sound: | 86% |
| Music: | 92% |
| Gameplay: | --% |
| Interest: | 91% |
| Overall: | 90% |
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