All the words available to the texts are taken from Kafka's original story. The "dictionary" for the work uses every word that Kafka used.

The grammar engine used has various components for creating sentences of various kinds and indeterminate length, creating and checking for plurality, conjugation and other basic grammatic necessities. Some more advanced aspects of the grammar engine include the ability for one sentence to read another and look for connections between nouns, verbs, etc. This allows sentences to form themselves in relation to the "meaning" contained in the sentences around it. I call this a "contextualisation device".

Some components of the Great Wall have a visual element, which is usually interactive as well. It may respond to the viewer, to a text or control another component of the work. The visual components are intended not as illustration of the texts but as part of the reading/writing process. In a sense, the text is mutating into another (visual) code. This visuality is however not about pictures but is itself another coding system. We witness the transmogrification of the linguistic into the abstract and obscure.

The Great Wall of China is a mesh of interacting codes.

One objective of this aspect of The Great wall of China (as distinct from its other media forms on CD-ROM, in book form and as an interactive installation) has been to minimise the bandwidth of the work. The Net is still very slow, so it seemed desirable to make the work very compact. The various elements are never more than a few kilobytes in size, allowing downloads in seconds, even though they are fully realtime interactive.

One way to achieve this degree of compactness was to not use images. Everything you see is created during runtime using the available drawing and typography tools on your own computer. When you download a component of the Great Wall of China all you are downloading is a program.