Phillip Toledano




affect, digital poetics, interactive, narrative, reading

Toucher – To Touch



digital poetics, interactive, reading

Katherine Hayles

empyre Digest, Vol 67, Issue 12

“The evidence now seems unmistakable:  reading extensively on the web has strong neurological consequences. To sum up this research: web reading catalyzes greater pattern recognition, increased spatial facility, and greater flexibility in noticing and responding to different information flows. It also leads to a distracted kind of reading in which (compared to print)  information is not processed as fully, remembered as long, or integrated as much into one’s existing mental schemas (held in long term memory). …  evidence suggests that the low-level activities of Web reading (clicking links, navigating websites, etc.), small as they are, nevertheless increase the cognitive load and therefore decrease the effectiveness with which information can be processed.  ”



interactive, reading, web 2.0

The Literary Platform

…showcasing projects experimenting with literature and technology.



reading, technology, web 2.0, writing

Patricia Greenfield: Technology & Informal Education

“By their very nature as a real-time medium,
action video games penalize the player who stops
to reflect. Indeed, no real-time medium—including
film, television, and radio—permits time to reflect
(28). The one communication technology that does
provide time to reflect is the written word…Whereas
reading is associated with reflection, television
is associated with impulsivity…
there is evidence that visual technology
inhibits imaginative response.”



academia, game, reading

Text 2.0

‘

“Imagine there were input devices which could allow text to know if and how it is being read – how would this change the reading experience?”



academia, reading

spreeder


see also, RSVP: Rapid Serial Visual Presentation



reading, web 2.0

F-Shaped Pattern

Reading Web Content (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)


“Heatmaps from user eyetracking studies of three websites. The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any fixations.”



eyes, reading, web, writing

Visual Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity

Miyawaki, Y. et al. Neuron 60, 915–929 (2008). - Visual Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity using a Combination of Multiscale Local Image Decoders

“In this study, we reconstructed visual images by combining local image bases of multiple scales, whose contrasts were independently decoded from fMRI activity by automatically selecting relevant voxels and exploiting their correlated patterns.”



bmi, neuroscience, reading, typography

George Orwell

Collected Essays(part19)

That grisly thing, a “poetry reading”, is what it is because there will always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who can’t remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob. And it is at bottom the same difficulty—the fact that a theatre audience is not a selected one—that makes it impossible to get a decent performance of Shakespeare in England. On the air these conditions do not exist. The poet FEELS that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something, and it is a fact that poets who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with a virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The element of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is that in the only way now possible the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange between man and man: also he has been led to think of his work as SOUND rather than as a pattern on paper. By that much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It already exists at the poet’s end of the aether-waves, whatever may be happening at the other end.



cochlea, convergences, reading

David Eggleton on reading

David Eggleton : “Much fuss is made of the fact that ‘now no-one does a whole lot of reading’ etc. etc. – all people really care about is the movies, even book page editors and reviewers. Poetry carries on, but the new factor in the poetry equation (writer/reader) is the custodial critic/curator / reviewer. Poets are used as counters between warring ideological tribes intent on rehabilitation or demolition.”


//

adrift in an ideological domain
temperate scavengers
work on notions of imperfect disclosure

//



adversary, curatorial, poets, reading

Eyes’ movements while reading


“This Newspaper has already been read. The eyes’ movements while reading were recorded, digitalized and then reproduced as a print-out.
What emerges is an intimation of something that is actually an invisible process, namely reading; what remains behind is a trace of the intake of information.”



infoViz, reading



neuroscience, reading, research, visual

TYPOTOPO

“This site represents the space where typography and topography overlap: explorations of type in virtual environments, experiments in mapping, and innovations in textual display. TYPOTOPO examines how the act of reading evolves when letters and words, viewed both as text and image, are placed in interactive and dynamic environments. TYPOTOPO explores typographic information spaces and the possibilities for playful, expressive letterforms.”




installation, reading, text, topology, typography

Seymour Papert

“It was in his laboratory that children first had the chance to use the computer to write and to make graphics. “



children, reading, writing

One Laptop per Child

“…it’s a global humanitarian cause.”



child, education, laptop, reading, social justice, writing

NOTATION AND THE ART OF READING, Karl Young


“The idea of notation implies, if not demands, performance. Virtually any form of writing is a kind of notation and any form of reading is a type of performance. Poetry is an intensely physical art, one that activates several senses at once. In aural societies poetry has traditionally been accompanied by facial movement, gesture, manipulation of symbolic objects, the drawing and painting of figures, the wearing of costumes, etc. — all of which, in a tribal context, are read. Poetry still is a physical art using multiple senses: the body as a whole equals or sometimes replaces the voice in performance art, and even silent readers turn pages, move their heads, their eyes, the roots of their tongues if not their tongues and lips, and so forth.”



academia, oral, performance, reading


Davis (1996, emphasis added):

“I’ve gradually smoothed over this more radical [ontological panpsychic] stance by strategically adopting methodological views (Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff’s cultural biographies of things, Stanley Fish’s reader-response theory of literary meaning) that would enable me to tell my biographical stories, and would at the same time domesticate my living objects within acceptable Western intellectual approaches. “Biographies” thus becomes a strategic metaphor for narrating the historical processes that surround objects over time, rather than the dead serious, non-metaphorical telling of an actual life of an embodied iconic being. Yet I don’t think that means that I entirely abandon my images to Western conceptualizations. In centering the book around stories, lives of individual objects that have led and continue to lead interesting and varied lives, I hope that there is a cumulative persuasive effect that I’m not using “lives” metaphorically or ironically, but as the expression of a serious ontological premise. My aim is that an accomodation between two different ideas of how images might in fact be alive will emerge over the course of the book.”

WRITING AS IF ICONS ARE REALLY ALIVE
(C.A.S.I. Position Paper)
Richard H. Davis
24 June 96



icons, images, life, ontological, panpsychism, reading