The Contested Surface of the Baroque Website (2004) is a visual essay for the journal Post-Identity. The article outlines the birth and development of visual interfaces in early design for the web. The text draws upon an ethnographic study in an effort to contextualize and describe the role of experimental web designers in contemporary digital visual culture. In order to understand this virtual community, it was imperative to first understand graphic designers—not engineers or technologists—as effective agents in cultural production. Web designers, I argued, expanded the definitions of graphic design and inexorably changed traditional design practices and professional communal structures. This study provided evidence of creative discourse that at times ran counter to commercial media manufacture and the complex relationships between media production and consumption. By looking at the community's online community sites and the experimental web designs themselves, I exposed bot the conservative and progressive influences on web-based cultural production. The baroque website was thus a dialectical surface upon which the struggle to define contemporary visual computer-mediated communication occurred.
The article is presented as an interactive Flash movie. It can be viewed here (requires Flash to be enabled). The text-only version is available here (Post-Identity website/University of Michigan)