the recipient must consequently be seen primarily as a contributor.

In his writings of 1970–1971 Bakhtin more explicitly examines the idea of the active recipient who has a share in the work coming about. Following Bakhtin, the process of reading and recording a work cannot be understood as a simple translation of another’s language into one’s own language, since the reader’s understanding consists in his ability to complete the work. The activity by which the understanding recipient approaches the work is thus active and creative, with its starting point being the recipient’s own viewpoint, world-view and personal attitudes. According to Bakhtin, therefore, the act of reading becomes one of ‹creative collaboration.› Once again, Bakhtin’s anticipation of later theories is remarkable: seeing the recipient not only as a participant in the creative act, he evaluates the procedure itself as ‹interaction.› Art, in his view, reveals itself to the recipient by means of an interactive process that takes on shape during the co-creative process of the reception of a work.

Iván Marino’s streaming-video-based online work

« »In Death’s Dream Kingdom» (2003) deals with several points of this theory. The author creates an audiovisual hypertext that develops through a complex plot of videographic elements. The work establishes a dichotomy, addressed in the content of the videos, between the narrative construction on the user’s part and the deconstruction of language and perception. The attempt to impose order on the chaos does not create a new narrative but instead brings about navigation accidents of a kind which allow the user to link new forms of the contents. For instance, Marino structures the audiovisual information on various levels, and makes all the users active in the network visible over the interface. Most theories concerned with the concepts of author and recipient are based on two, shared, assumptions: first, the assumed central importance of the discourse about the defined object; second, the assumption that the object is a carrier of meaning or, as applicable, that the recipient can concede to it a specific meaning. Both of these basic assumptions are placed in question by new interpretations which have come about specifically in the interactive and telematic areas in the course of