The design of the Web of Life book tells anecdotes, through images, of daily confrontations in and with networks. The book avoids a language of images that orients itself according to stereotypes and icons of network phenomenology, for example, boring »commonplaces« such as the @ symbol. The illustrations seek out common features of particular instances. In the same way that small excerpts of complex structures resemble themselves, accurate image statements can be made with excerpts of our cultural reality that have been arranged in a collage. The motifs are meant to call forth associations that are connected with the personal treasure of experiences of the viewers and that, therefore, can be interpreted differently by each individ-ual. With the collage, an open form of image design has been consciously chosen that, through stylization, turns the inconsistency of its images into a statement: All the individual parts of an image only make sense on a higher level of meaning. In the language of network logic: The whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Excerpts of the past and the present are taken out of their former context and interwoven to form a new world of images. New spaces are created that unite the metaphors of the private and references to the public in visual »playgrounds«. At times, they appear to be either humorous, dark, retrospective, or fictional. The future is not treated as a prognosis, but as scenery. Therefore, no illustration is brought into the awkward situation of needing to portray credible science fiction worlds or hyper-complex network structures. The interpretation is left to the viewer, and this results in an interesting effect: There is a way of viewing illustrations before and a way of viewing them after reading the book.

The upper tableau symbolizes consequently further developed »fields of experience« of human encounters, i.e., chat »rooms«. The Web offers »space« for all kinds of eclectic means of expression. Fashion, surroundings, status, and communicative disposition can be freely chosen. The encounter of personalities is staged on a self-designed stage or meeting place. Everyone takes on the role that they desire to – or the role that they allow themselves to be given. The unlimited access to the global-historic knowledge of mankind opens new combinatory forms of expression.

The lower tableau plays with the dynamics of societies. Since Homer, it is common knowledge that each unlawful action must be followed by its fateful atonement – this is a basic prerequisite of social networks. The networks’ laws are what people organize themselves by. Homer’s protagonists are still active: Paris, Helen, Priam, Cassandra, Hector, Achilles, Ulysses, and Æneas are the principal actors in a continuing soap opera. The Iliad is a blueprint for the electronic age. The wooden »Trojan horse« (as computer viruses are also called) serves as a symbol for the susceptibility of complex systems. Attacks against the networks of civilization come out of these networks themselves. Therefore, human societies – as well as ecological communities – can never be portrayed as being in balance.

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