The very best art transcends the limitations of its audience and delivers a unique message which alters the participant's mind. The audience is necessarily a participant in the result because without a receiver, there is no way of knowing what, IF ANY, message was sent. As McLuhan observes, message reception can be garbled. When one reads them one takes on the work of both transmitting and receiving, and the latter is invariably stiffed. The audience is now lost because it has tried to access the art through a weak or inappropriate interface.
Interface is subject to unguessable local conditions.
It is best to make it simple, clean, and workable under a maximum of probable situations. I'd sure prefer men got their balls symbolically chopped off than that I got my cunt amputated. 010101 may have some of the most stunning works known to man buried under its horrible interface. Then again, with a third of the navigation options vanishing off the left side of my screen once I did painfully make my way in, maybe not. Gabrielle Taylor is a either a writer or a disaffected web consultant in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.