MovieCube is a response to the insulting inadequacy of movie rating systems -- those crude attempts to quantify the ineffable complexities of human experience. No longer will we accept the false promises of a five-star rating, the reduction of the sublime to a number.

Our perceptions of art are shaped and molded by the systems that we use to evaluate them. A one-star movie isn't worth watching. A five-star movie must be watched. These systems demand we conform to a standardized measurement of experience and present us with hiveminded averages or distributions, flattening what is already two-dimensional. In a word, mediocrity.

Rather than a single, static measurement of the worth of a film, MovieCube records a representation of a viewer's interaction with a film, remembering it in three axes and placing it in navigable space alongside other recorded experiences. It does away with the concept of "quality" and replaces it with unabashedly subjective experience: thinking, seeing, and feeling.

The problem with rating systems is not just that they reduce a complex and multifaceted experience to a simplistic numerical score, but that they imply a universality of response that is simply untrue. Each of us brings our own unique perspectives, biases, and experiences to the art we engage with, and to reduce all of these individual and often contradictory responses to a single, standardized rating is to do a disservice to the richness and diversity of human experience that art asks us to confront.

Cinema is not a disposable commodity to be consumed and rated, but a reflection of human experience, and it deserves to be experienced with all the depth and complexity that it offers. And to reduce it to a sterile, lifeless rating system is to deny its very soul.