READING VOICE

2018-19|Text, sound, construction, software and hardware.

 

Reading Voice is an installation that explores the zone between, on the one hand, a spoken word as an event in time, and, on the other, a written word as an object in space. The cognitive activity of reading is disrupted and various spaces of encounter are staged between the reading body and the written text.
Central to the installation is a booth for a single viewer with a digital screen displaying text, an eye tracker and custom software that sonifies the reader’s gaze by instantly sounding phonemes they look at. This process unsettles the established relations between the voice, looking, written words and meaning. The disruption activates and stretches a pre-view of a view as an open temporal interval emerging between sensing and making sense. In addition a wall text and a printed booklet stage variants of the relations between text and reading body, their dispositions highlighting how each specifically define and affect the encounter and intra-action between the body and the text.

Reading Voice is a part of artistic research project Reading Reading (2017-). The research project is a manifestation of the various ways to capture, embody and unsettle the temporal relations that unfold between the written text, eye movement, and the (inner) voice while reading.