Caged Freedom: Expression Beyond Bars

Daniel's hypertext essay helped to trigger a realization, concerning the mixture of language, in my mind.  The manner in which the audio, text, and visual sequences are presented relieved me of a limiting thought.    The common sense version of my experience was that less can be more.  I understood this phrase, but I wasn't ready to apply it whole-heartedly to a piece until Daniel's hypertext essay.  I feel that because of the essay's lack of human visual representation, more humanity is released in its interpretation.  We are not shown the prisoners or the prison, only a graphic design with intermittent flashes of gray and white text.  This struck me as especially powerful on the bare-life/human-life section.  Given the context, but not being presented with a face or body to attribute our interpretation to, the meaning we attribute to the text and audio is produced and reflected back on us.  Instead of empathizing with the "unknown" prisoner, we are forced into the predicament of audience creation, while also being the audience.  This creates a cyclic pattern where we feed our perceptions into the meaning of the text, which then repeats returning as a new more personal-emotional perception.  This is unavoidable due to our systematic instinctual nature through which we perceive the world.  By limiting our viewpoint to audio, text, and graphic design; Daniel has forced the participant to engage in the construction of some meaning for themselves.  Essentially, the meta-pictorial or hyper-iconic effect wears the colors of existentialism.  This essay makes its participants construct more meaning than they would have garnered through viewing video-clips.  The participant is lead to labor and produce, instead of lazily accepting a view.  More thought must be applied, so Daniel's essay does its job, in bringing the reader's thoughts to the issue at hand rather than a passing glance.