READING (AS) BODIES

2020|Text, sound, custom software, wireless speakers, digital positioning system.

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Reading (as) Bodies is a spatial intervention, responsive sound installation and performative setting emphasizing the notion of written text as a graphic territory and the act of reading as a bodily movement. Using tracing technology and digital sound synthesis the installation accommodates a situation where visitors bodily inhabit the graphic representation and sonic manifestation of written text simultaneously through the processes of magnification, movement and slowing down.
A text “DESIRE TO SENSE MAKE” is laid on the floor. Software system maps the floor text to the prerecorded voices reading the text so that the written phonemes on the floor correspond to the sound of the spoken phonemes. As the visitors or performers occupy the written text on the floor, the loudspeakers they are wearing emit the sounds of the spoken phonemes according to where on the written text they stand on or walk over. Each loudspeaker sounds a unique voice. The bodies are literary stepping through the spoken text as they are walking on the written text. This situation disrupts the practice of reading and unsettles the established relations between body, text, voice, movement, space and hearing.

On the occasion of the first presentation at V2_Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, members of MAZE ensemble Anne LaBerge, Reinier van Houdt and Yannis Kyriakides were invited to activate and explore the installation as a performative setting (image 3).

Reading (as) Bodies is a part of artistic research project Reading Reading (2017-). The project investigates the experience of reading as an interface between our interior mental state and the exterior world, asking whether what separates the two is a temporal, flexible and virtual gap, as opposed to a fixed corporal/material border.