Starry Night

Voyager

Available in Hybrid format

ISBN 1559404698

Review by Michael Richter

To explore the van Gogh painting Starry Night with this CD-ROM is to enter the artist's world and to live within the painting. Albert Boime leads you into the adventure with a description of the work and its genesis, of Paris before the turn of the century, and of the forces which dictated its creation. He argues persuasively that it is the work of a more-than-rational genius, not a madman. The astronomer Flammarion and other contemporaries are drawn into the tale in multi-branched, vividly narrated slide shows. Brilliant images of many of van Gogh's paintings are accompanied by his relevant correspondence and a wide range of related stills-portraits, drawings, paintings, posters, and photographs. Those slides are of exceptional quality: crisp in detail and showing remarkable color quality even on an uncalibrated monitor.

On the mechanical side, the CD-ROM requires a color Mac or an MPC-compliant Windows computer. It needs less than a megabyte of hard-drive space plus the supplied Quicktime if not already installed. Installation is painless and the documentation, while scant, is sufficient. A minor bug in the Windows configuration is given a workaround in the documentation and a patch is provided without charge by mail or by download.

The program ran flawlessly. Using higher-quality video than required generated a caution screen suggesting reducing color depth and left some menus hard to read. It is possible to wander far enough from a main thread to make returning to the point of interruption difficult. As a result, the best way to use the disc is to follow the two primary slide shows first, then to start over following all the threads that emerge from them. On that path, one may spend three or four hours before turning to the high-resolution image which one may view in detail at substantial enlargement.

Starry Night belongs in every library and every art department as a tool and an entertainment; in the home, it may be overkill and lead to frustration that there are not similar CD-ROMs for many more works. A program of this quality is little more than an appetizer to stir one's hunger for more.

Michael Richter is a freelance writer and an avid reader who lives in Los Angeles. He can be reached at mikrichter@interramp.com or at http://www.webcom.com/mrichter.

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