At the end of the twentieth century, many computer users combined writing code with design. The technical limitations of the digital medium left little space for visual design, and very few designers and artists had the technical knowledge required to graphically organize the screen. Interface design was highly specialized, so these first digital artists needed training in both the arts and programming or to have sufficient perseverance to make pacts with a programmer.

A scene emerged from these heroic feats of pacts and burnt-out retinas around the format of the CD-ROM which, together with the software company Macromedia (Authorware, Director, Shockwave), gave birth to baroque multimedia that would forever change our experience of the screen. These CD-ROMs, with a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels and a capacity of 700 MB, permitted the distribution of 24-bit color images, 8-bit sound, animated graphics, and even video. Play, the intimate dynamics of the user and fluid action-reaction, in the formal and physical context of the CD-ROM encompassed a diverse biotope that attempted to break with former rules of language and aesthetics for the benefit of the user experience and sensory ecstasy as a vehicle for thought.

Today, exploring these interfaces is almost an anthropological endeavor. Interaction in these works enjoys a wild freedom which has nothing to do with the concepts of useability that would later be applied, above all through the democratization of Internet and Web usability principles (Jakob Nielsen). A New Economy, associated with the rise of dotcom companies, began to capitalize on knowledge. Drifting and playing around in interfaces was no longer a good business strategy.

LSUX aims to recover and examine those early experiences of a moment of transition full of epiphanies in front of the screen. To focus our attention on the blurry space that was ours then and which emerged when the spheres of analogue knowledge and the first digital awakening met. A transitory territory. A territory which plays at avoiding us like an analogue mountain.

Enrique Radigales