28.3.05
Dada Photomontage and net.art Sitemaps
Maps of websites represent them as networks of linked files and provide perspective on the sites and their parts. Some of these maps and perspectives are utterly standardized (those for information retrieval, for example), but some are as much for interpretation as navigation. This piece sketches a semiotics of website imagemaps. Even more than Cubist collage, Dada photomontage (Höch, Hausmann, Schwitters, Grosz/Heartfield) presents very suggestive images composed of signifying fragments ranging from small schematic arrangements to wildernesses of profusion. One sees several patterns (matrix, swirl, cascade) with their associated semantics. We then apply these categories and principles to website imagemaps to see what the imagemap is saying visually about the site and our experience of it.
# posted by alvaro @ 6:55 p. m. 
