Critical Mass: America’s Race to Build the Atomic Bomb / Corbis

During World War II, the United States and Germany each discovered the technology needed to create the atomic bomb: The race was to be the first. "Critical Mass" brings this dramatic struggle to life with fascinating documentaries, biographies of the scientists and a 3-D re-creation of Los Alamos as it was during the Manhattan Project. The user or viewer can virtually explore the Los Alamos site. Using a slider bar and map metaphor, the viewer can roam the compound as it appeared during World War II. Sounds of machinery, background noises, popular tunes from the period add texture to the experience. Brief slide shows are enhanced with narratives. There is a tremendous amount of information housed within an exquisite interface, allowing users to follow time, a personality or just streams of thought without getting lost.


Beyond the Wall / Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment

"Beyond the Wall" allows the user to learn about the making of the Vietnam Memorial through video, text, graphics, and audio.The ability to visit a 3D environment exploring objects left behind by mourners is an eloquent emotional testimony to the many who died in that controversial war. There are also video interviews of people who lived and worked during war time- adding a human element to the memorial through video, text, graphics, and audio. This CD-ROM is created with effectively chosen news footage, essays, and a selection of letters that have an emotional resonance- such as the one in which a soldier writes a friend, "When not possible to answer all letters, I’ll answer in spirit," not long before he is killed in battle.


The Complete Maus - A Survivor’s Tale / Art Spiegelman

The unimaginable brutality and horror of the Holocaust did not evaporate with the surrender of Nazi Germany and the Liberation of the death camps in 1945. Like a tattoo, the psychological, emotional, and physical disfigurement of that experience has stayed with the survivors ever since, sometimes overshadowing their lives and coloring their relationships with their children and families
-E. Rideout Interactivity Magazine Sept/Oct 1995


It seemed to me that the disc’s design and structure needed to be true to the topic. .... The way you get at the information should teach you as much as the information itself... artists who are comfortable in their medium need to feel comfortable with the way their work is translated into another...
-Art Spiegelman Interactivity Magazine Sept/Oct 1995


Art Spiegelman’s memoir of his father’s experiences during the Holocaust, was hailed as a powerful work of history. It represented a new level of maturity for a century-old art form: namely comics. With the appearance of MAUS, words and pictures could be used to portray any subject matter- even genocide and persecution of the Polish and German Jews during the Second World War. In "The Complete Maus" the user has access to historical details linked to sketches, drafts, archival photographs, drawings made by prisoners and audio from interviews between Art and his father that are the basis of this narrative, His work is powerful and groundbreaking, forming a chilling commentary of society.


What seemed to capture my heart was the fact that Spiegelman had taken the opportunity to preserve his father’s voice that he recorded on cheap cassette tapes. Art Spiegelman describes the story of his parents’ confinement in Auschwitz, their life in the US and his own coming to terms with their personal tragedy.


I believe his work has substance, permanence and weight. It speaks to the viewer on many levels. As I read more about the artist, the entire project of Maus surprised, oppressed and exhausted him, partly because the material Spiegelman drew from for inspiration consisted of hundreds of hours of interviews with his father, videos from Auschwitz, images of life in the camps, actual documents that chronicle the parents imprisonment and hundreds of working sketches. Many sketches are accessible from buttons on the book pages, others are part of a rich informational slide show selected in data branches, such as this one. Using a sketchbook metaphor, this selected interface is the introduction to a tour of Spiegelman’s development and influences. Each branch is presented as a Quicktime slide show of Spiegelman talking about the process that was going on at that given moment. Included in Maus are many documents and artworks that were created as a result of the success of Maus. These comic panels are from a work that Spiegelman created for The New Yorker about a trip to Rostock, Germany, (site of the bombing that killed several immigrants) as part of a speaking engagement on Maus. The piece is an extension of contemporary racism in Germany. The final interface contains a tour of what went into the making of Maus. Each rollover button reveals the subject of every information branch, and the smaller icons indicate the type of information to be found there.


During my research, I stumbled upon a statement made by Art Spiegelman in which he was asked about his thoughts on the production of "Schindler’s List" created by Steven Spielberg. He stated that he thought the production values of "Schindler’s List" were much too expensive and that it was manipulative and not true enough to the facts.


Spiegelman in my opinion seemed to be true to the disc’s inherent structure in which how you get to the information teaches you as much as the information itself. "The Complete Maus" is remarkably complete, you come away with a heightened sense of the lives and years that were the genesis of MAUS.

© Copyright 1997 Denise Urban