w00t by Bob Ostertag and John Cooney
w00t (the name itself is a reference to 1337 and internet culture) is a low-fi type of multimedia. It is a fifty minute long album, but with only one track. What makes it multimedia is the fundamental connectedness of the actual audio and the cover art that goes with it. The two pieces that make up w00t are built from the same blocks: the culture of the mash-up, gaming, and the open ended possibilities of publishing on the internet.
The two components of w00t are meant to be consumed together, the way cover art should be an integral part of a physical album. However, even though the audio and graphic portions of w00t go together, they do not interact in any concrete way. The work cannot be controlled by the user in a traditional multimedia sense. It's much more open ended than that. It can be modified by the user, legally and realistically. In my opinion, that is a much better form of interaction than giving the user a fixed number of ways (no matter how large that number may be) to interact with a work.
Listening to w00t is like having your mind processed in a blender. The blender is full of something delicious (let's say strawberry daiquiri mix), but there are shards of shrapnel (in our metaphor, we'll call those shards “ice”) that really hurt when they hit. Tasty aural and mental pain.
The underlying metaphor in w00t is one of rolling, collecting, and aggregating. It is very Katamari Damacy. The cover art shows this literally, with the prince rolling a Katamari that is composed of characters and elements from the eighteen games that the sounds on the album are taken from. The metaphor comes into play when we look at the sound portion of the work. It is an aggregated collection of seemingly unrelated audio (the sounds all are related, of course, in that they are all from video games) that makes up a puzzling, but most excellent whole. Kind of like a Katamari. Not to mention the elements of the audio that actually sound like rolling. These rolling sounds seem to tie the different audio objects together.
It is very much worth mentioning that w00t does not exist the way a traditional album does. It is only available as a download. There is no CD to buy, no money to pay. It was made to be distributed and altered. In essence, it seems to be more of a statement than an album. The sounds (and the images on the cover) come from video games. It is not traditional music, and in fact verges more on the electroacoustic. It is not restrictively licensed (instead, it uses a Creative Commons Attribution license) and probably isn't even legal, except within the bounds of fair use (clearance for sounds from eighteen different video games would be hard to get, and expensive). This is what makes it so great. It exists in the true internet spirit of sharing, modifying, open distribution, and discourse. This is what makes the name so appropriate. This album is worth the exclamation.