Chapter 3 - Reading In

Summary

Beginning with the digitally printed formats of experimental fiction, emphasis turns to the inner grain of literary reading, as foregrounded by the irregular digital Font by conceptual text artist Fiona Banner. Such a graphic experiment is brought into comparison with the ridged texture of our ordinary literary response to the contours of subvocally deciphered script. Parallels emerge with the ironic calligraphy and effacing inkwork of contemporary Chinese artists, in a dissident vein, as well as with the work of American new media poet and theorist John Cayley, whose installation practice takes him beyond the limits of aesthetic literacy to phonorobotics and “aurature” (vs. literature). Discussion moves then to a satiric text by Bennett Sims about an academic anti-hero who furiously over-reads the lip movements of non-speaking parts in a Hitchcock film, thereby travestying the silent signifiers – the “visemes” in their operation as phonemes – of an actual textual page.