You would not believe how hard this was to track down. Hiropon is one of Murakami’s most famous works, but very few art history sources I’ve seen ever describe this particular iteration of it. There’s really only one definitive description of the Macintosho exhibit online.
Macintosho was an exhibit held by new media publisher Digitalogue in 1993, where they invited 21 artists to create digital works for Mac that would be a) exhibited on-site, and b) sold as individual floppy disks. Each work individually is obscure, and the full exhibit set is vanishingly rare. The author of the one and only exhibit retrospective owns the only documented full set that I can find.
A friend has been trying to track down Murakami’s Macintosho work - it’s an interesting footnote in his career as the first ever computer artwork he exhibited, but rarely or never shows up in retrospectives of his early career. He finally managed to buy a copy a few weeks ago and sent it to me for scanning and preservation. Thankfully it was in great shape, so the work is now scanned, preserved, and we’ve actually been able to find out what the heck it is.
In an ideal world, I'd love to collect and preserve the full set. There are some very interesting artists who participated, and as far as I can tell very few of these works were ever distributed in any other form.1 But I'm not holding my breath. Finding one of these works took this long; finding the other 20 will take quite a bit longer.
-
Hideki Nakazawa's Baka Video Drug might be the only one; I have a copy of its other floppy disk release already.
