______ guest house cd-rom

"Can you tell me about a room?"
"What happened there?"

The Guest House CD-ROM is based on the Guest House performance, and is both a new digital project and an innovative approach to documenting live performance. You become the player in an interactive guest house, wandering freely through an "impossible building", composed of rooms and events drawn from other peoples' memories, triggering sound, video clips, text and computer animations.

In the interactive Guest House we imagine representations of the rooms described in the Guest House interviews, and bring them together in a virtual structure, the form of which alludes both to computer gaming and an architectural "walk-through". Here, the spectator becomes a player in the work, weaving their own narrative threads through the spaces the company have visualised.

The CD-ROM can be viewed as a screen-based work on a standard PC or MAC. In addition a special version for gallery exhibition can be made available, which was shown in Arnolfini Gallery as an interactive installation in January 2001. The company has also developed a performative presentation of the CD-ROM which has been presented at Space [Inter:face], a Digital Summer event in Manchester, at Scarborough University and at Arnolfini, Bristol.

Copies are available at specialist art bookshops or directly through contacting us.

For a detailed overview about the Guest House project and the CD-ROM click here.

Click here to view some screen shots and information about the technical background of the CD-ROM

Neil Jenkins created a web-based re-staging of Guest House in the form of a popular memory game, which is accessible at http://www.da2.org.uk/guesthouse.


The Guest House CD-ROM was commissioned by DA2, the Digital Arts Development Agency. Supported by Digital Summer 2000 as part of its Space [Inter:face] season, and published in association with Arnolfini Live.