This online environment is such that "the viewer can choose which places in the World she would like to see based on descriptions, and those written descriptions
place in the viewer's mind an expectation of what she will see."4 And so at the site of interaction between viewer and piece, the lines between text and context blur, redefining a system of language that has been in place (for much longer than web cams) at a fundamental level. As Brooke Knight notes, "transmission and reception are two very different activities."5 Therefore, a collapse of space - wherein the viewer allows internal whims to decide which text-based caption seems most suitable to meld with others - is only further complicated via the resulting image's relationship with itself (a conflation of two or more environments that would not exist without the click of a humanly-operated mouse). In effect, "Every Environment is Text Rich #4" visually relays that texts are contexts themselves, and not inanimately embedded within them - at once subverting the canonical hierarchy of written language and visual meaning, while making the language one filters the world through more malleable.

It is this very malleability that speaks volumes of the ideology of individualism and authorial intention, two paradigms that Brooke Knight's clever piece challenges freely and playfully. When asked what it means to be trapped in a space, or "landscape" online, Brooke Knight comments that, "the Internet makes possible live representations of someplace that we [the viewers and interpreters] only have a limited knowledge of [and] the way that I have made the project, however, limits what can be seen, as does the angle of the cam, and the images chosen by the viewers. It freezes those places as well as expresses them."6 So it can be understood, that when writers write they are also written. In order to communicate effectively we must utilize well-worn concepts and conventions. Unfortunately, whilst our intention to communicate, and what we intend to communicate, are both important to us as individuals, meaning cannot be reduced to "authorial intention."7 Roland Barthes held the belief that it is language which speaks, and not the individual voice of the author, or as found in "Every Environment is Text Rich #4," the eye of the web cam. The difficulty with the still image, however, is that it is presupposed to be a natural, and therefore, authoritative one. Sitting in space, waiting to be discovered, a photograph has the ability to toy with the senses, deceptively retrieving from and imprinting on the mind a sense of temporality, a solid essence. This is where the ephemeral nature of Brooke Knight's online environment can work to exclude definitive boundaries by way of the system of codes used to demarcate these very boundaries themselves. These images, no matter how fictional, are technically embedded in a real, "hypertextual" space. They open a whole new area of discourse on the nature of environment, more specifically wilderness. When asked to consider the term "wilderness," Brooke Knight "imagine[s] something out of James Fennimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales (i.e. The Last of the Mohicans)."8 And as in the case of this romantic tale, Brooke Knight understands that "we think that wilderness means untamed and unbounded, but that is just a pretty fiction."9

Footnotes:
4Knight, Brooke. Email correspondence interview March 16 2004
5Knight, Brooke. Email correspondence interview March 16 2004
6Knight, Brooke. Email correspondence interview March 16 2004
7To define meaning in terms of authorial intention is the so-called 'intentional fallacy' identified by W K Wimsatt and M C Beardsley of the 'New Critical' tendency in literary criticism (Wimsatt & Beardsley 1954). We may, for instance, communicate things without being aware of doing so
8Knight, Brooke. Excerpt from artist statement for Digital Visions submission
9Knight, Brooke. Email correspondence interview March 16 2004