[+/-] Reader Response Theory and GUI Design
Reading is to books/texts what using is to interfaces. Reading is often assumed to be passive: texts contain known meanings. But, as with food, text enters into different bodies. One person may be allergic to a particular food; another may love it. Positive and negative associations may influence the reading of the text. Literary criticism evolved in the mid twentieth century to incorporate the idea of the reader as an active participant in the construction of meaning. Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, and Susan Sontag were among those theorists who developed and came to accept the role of the reader as an interpretive agent to some degree. Fish in his 1980 "Is There a Text in This Class" argued that readers approached texts with interpretive bias that constructed their experience of it. For Fish, the sameness of how many texts are experienced is due to 'interpretive communities' who share and propagate meanings.

It is my feeling that interface design theorists will increasingly follow this same path. The user of an interface is not a generic entity. Experience, aptitude, age, gender, operating system, culture, sensibility, interests, moods...the list of potential factors which could influence or bias response to an interface are huge. To isolate any one variable in a quantifiable valid experimental protocol ultimately involves stripping an interface down to an extremely simplistic representation. This reduction risks eradicating the living quality of an artwork. The reader may be faced with a situation that is formally rigorous yet aesthetically sterile. For this reason, I have chosen to take the notion of 'art-research' literally: art-research provokes irreducible qualitative responses on an individual basis that have validity as research results even if not intended by the artist or explicitly elucidated in any theoretical framing text.

Digital poetry art-works themselves create complex responses that emerge from the confluence of many features. I am not suggesting that quantifiable analysis is impossible, merely that it risks eviscerating the subtle essence of aesthetic experience; it would necessitate protracted and careful work which is beyond my scope as a solitary practitioner.

Multiple complex reader-specific interpretive analysis opens pathways to understanding the idiosyncratic effect of digital poetics. In this analysis, the confluence of variables is too complex to reduce without harming or destroying the actuality of the work. This form of analysis is generalist and seeks to understand through practice and design iteration how art can be made that has an effect locally on me, the artist. It is assumed that work that resonates and 'works' intuitively and visually for one being will invariably have some sort of audience (how ever marginal that might be). In this way, I cannot argue for any generalizable conclusions, but the ability to deal with complex multimedia interfaces is left open.

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