Website Graphics: The Best of Global Design - Review

Website Graphics: The Best of Global Design is a coffee-table book put together by professionals who know the field well, whose criteria for assessment of the sites indicate some of the distinctive features of this new form. Eschewing mere virtuosity in software graphics, the editorial committee targeted "visual clarity of interactive design - the navigation devices, the choice of metaphors, and also the visual transition from page to page" (7). The notion of interaction has to be qualified as "user-selection," but the issues of navigation and transition are key to Website operations. Navigation in particular is emerging as a fundamental issue, since orientation in cyberspace has yet to achieve established conventions. Attention to metaphor is highly crucial, since it is not mere rational logic or ease of operation that seduces the viewer/user into a Web site. As in any other experience, motivation has to be sustained. There has to be some reason to keep going structured into the moment-to-moment experience of the site. This book requires some patience since it attempts the difficult task of trying to illustrate sites in a static format through use of detailed captions and screen grabs to describe the way the sites work.

Margaret Morse's Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture, though not explicitly focused on art in the electronic environment, raises issues central to the transformations being wrought by new media technology on contemporary culture. Informed by her extensive studies in the area of critical and cultural theory, Morse's work provides a crucial and much needed framework for analyzing video, graphic art, and electronically produced imagery within networks of virtuality. For Morse, the concept of the virtual is carefully nuanced as a set of mediated relations between individuals, "machines" (she uses the term loosely to describe electronic apparatuses, most of which lack any and all mechanical parts), and the domain of culturally constructed social reality which are the effect of new media - whether in the arts, communication, or commercial applications. Drawing on an impressive range of materials for her theoretical foundation, Morse moves with admirable facility between the discussion of "blindness" as a construct in Heidegger's phenomenological analysis of vision and insight to the integration of this notion into an analysis of the displacements effected by the spatially and temporally discontinuous interconnections peculiar to electronic modes of communication.

Her compelling thesis is that the illusion of contextlessness produced by information technology requires a new, synthetic understanding of specific cybernetic modalities so that the ways in which ars electronica mediates and produces social relations of power can be unmasked with critical tools appropriate to their operations. Her chapters focus on topics from news graphics, malls, and freeways, to video in installation art. But her critical discussion of cultural transformations brought about by new media are germane to artists and historians in every sphere of contemporary activity, since the world Morse so accurately describes and analyzes provides our common context for art making or its understanding.