The Bowie Booth
Apple, Virgin, and David Bowie's 1.Outside — lost for thirty years, found in my attic
In 1995 I programmed an interactive kiosk for David Bowie’s 1.Outside, deployed by Apple and Virgin Records in record stores across North America. It was presumed lost media for three decades — until March 2026, when the CD-R turned up in a box of Mac install discs I was clearing out for the move to Finland.
The Booth
A few late-night code sessions that ended up on the side of a bus
At the time I was doing my day job at The Direct Response Agency and spending evenings helping out at Denovo New Media — the studio behind the 1.Outside album artwork. When the Booth commission came, I built it with Davide De Angelis, writing it in Macromedia Director, running on a Mac LC with a keyboard and mouse. Through mid-1995, Apple and Virgin Records deployed it in around thirty Virgin Megastores across North America to promote the album.
Inside were music videos and song clips, a discography timeline, and the album’s Nathan Adler diary reworked as something you could explore — drag the key into the lock and the lyrics opened up. It also carried one of the earliest name-and-address collection mechanisms I know of: visitors signed up on the booth, and the data was harvested onto floppy disk daily. That mechanism is now regarded as a precursor to BowieNet, the artist-run ISP Bowie launched three years later.
Screens from the restored program, running again in 2026.
The booths saw a reported 30,000-plus visitors — and the campaign got full bus wraps reading “Visit the Apple BOWIE BOOTH”. I still find it odd that a few late-night code sessions with Davide ended up as something promoted on the side of a bus.
Davide’s photo of the campaign bus, 1995.
Lost and Found
Thirty years of lost media, one attic, and a working restoration
For thirty years the Booth was gone — none of us who made it kept a copy, and by early 2026 it was being actively hunted as lost media, with researchers tracking down everyone named in the credits, me included.
Then, in March 2026, while clearing out vintage Macs ahead of the move to Finland — and with a tip-off from my studio AI agent about which box to check — I found it in the attic: a hand-labelled CD-R, “Bowie Interactive Sales Booth”, tucked into a crate of old Mac system install discs.
The find itself: one jewel case, one gold Verbatim CD-R, thirty years in a loft.
A USB drive read it first time. I imaged it three ways to preserve the classic-Mac resource forks, and a researcher who had contacted me about it months earlier had the Nathan Adler diary working in Director 5 the same day. Within a week the full program was running perfectly in an emulated Mac — and he’d lovingly ported it to Windows.
Not bad for a disc that spent three decades in a loft. It’s the neatest lesson my career keeps teaching: media formats die, platforms betray you, but a well-labelled backup in a dry box is forever.