Promiscuous Design depends upon viewer participation to gain meaning. With each click of the mouse, viewers add compounding layers of sound, images and text. Upon entering the site, viewers are immediately accosted with feedback sounds which continue to play as long as the window is open. Depending on what the viewer has activated, the audio may include (on top of the feedback loop) a whispering or a radio-news broadcast and/or set of instructions which bombards the user's space and with more clicks through the "Channels" part of the site, more content appears onto the picture plane as well as the words, "culture, property, law, monetary, speech, the keel". At the same time, the initial words and phrases begin to be "scratched" out, the words literally appear doodled over, and the site begins continue to be increasingly degraded and become more chaotic. By placing the mouse over new words, viewers open new dialogue boxes that contain more text13. Initialising the "Frequencies" section of the web site launches further layers of action (for example, scrolling vertical lines, boxes, images, mini-movies and/or a grid obscuring the entire user screen). Each activated element may build up and accumulate upon one another.

The more buttons checked, the more sounds, scribbles, arrows, images, lines, boxes, and movies appear so that the user's interaction ultimately leads to the work's deconstruction and hence reflects the piece's work as referenced by its more "Promiscuous Design."

Nelson believes that Promiscuous Design may be defined as a "combination of performance and topographic space making."14 The performance lies in the user's creation and the "topographic" is defined by the "single term titling present on each page, [and] within the differences in sound and image."15 The piece unfolds and expands, layer by layer as a direct result of users' decisions in exploring the work. Promiscuous Design causes viewers to experience the site as a multi-layered sensory driven environment where complex and unexpected user interface reactions can create user mayhem. The net driven artwork forces users to navigate through unmarked paths to reach an undefined goal. Nelson sees both the frustration and annoyance [as] central to the enjoyment"16 and investigation of his work. Each environment within Promiscuous Design is filled with hidden links and Nelson accepts that few people will "ever see the entire work, will ever click on each link, or will ever find each section."17 He states that, therefore, the "meaning of any net-art creation have to be multiplied and varied"18 While viewers struggled to navigate Promiscuous Design, Nelson is more concerned with their overall receptive experience, be it good or bad.

Promiscuous Design challenges users' preconceived notions of space and time. The Internet as a digital medium does not occupy any physical space; rather it resides within time and the liminal space of the digital infrastructures that holds it and gives it definition. As a piece of net art, Promiscuous Design requires a viewer to validate the work through his/her own personal experiences of how the Internet functions.

Promiscuous Design may be improperly considered as delimiting due to questions of inaccessibility. Nelson's collection of news media related sources in combination with his encoded delivery methods produce a work that is, at times, seemingly unapproachable. With limited site navigation, viewers may be left uncertain of how to interpret the juxtapositions of shapes, sounds, and images.

Nelson forces viewers to work within his unique system of semiotics, space, and user interaction to form a process of what he sees as being a part of a more complicated system of digital poetics. Viewers are faced with a system defined by the artist and must judge whether they can move forward through the hidden links and jarring sounds. Nelson states that his work "is [not] meant to be a puzzle to be deciphered"19, rather, he wants "the user/reader to have an experience, to have their imaginations and feelings coaxed in certain directions."21 As a new media artist, Nelson finds fulfillment by encouraging "play and thought… or curious perplexment"21 within his audience. However, one wonders if it is possible for a new language and/or possible for a set of processes to be learned by a viewer successfully within one encounter as proposed by the artist. Viewers entering Promiscuous Design will need to work in order to comprehend the net art piece or may be left without words to describe their experiences.

Footnotes:
13 Bits and pieces from various news sources, spliced together to form fragmented anecdotes
14 interview Tuesday March 15, 2005
16 ibid
16 interview Monday, March 21, 2005 via email
17 ibid
18 ibid
19 ibid
20 ibid
21 ibid