I was actually giving this some thought and actually edited it out of a post I was going to make. C0DA interests me for a few reason now, which are tied to the visual. I'll skip over my whole spiel about how words look/feel but yeah, that was there for me. But moreover...
I think the piece is in an interesting position because not all the art is there. At least from what I can tell. So, there's two interesting things going on. The most obvious of which being that the naked reader without images is creating images in their mind, as any reader does for anything they ever read. Then they compare it to what other artists have made. Which is always fun.
But because of the above process of creating the visuals as you read, there's a bit of a race to "catch up" to the text because the mind is multitasking in a very heavy way because the piece has such a heavy stress on images, moreso than a casual piece of text. This makes the initial read a very different experience than subsequent ones but not in the sense that they're realizing information they missed or understanding a metaphor that eluded them. No, the difference is that they're actually reading at a different cadence altogether.