Reading Machines

An excerpt from my MA proposal: "In a time when the act of reading is changing significantly, the physical book as a mechanism for reading text is being brought into question. I propose an investigation into what that means for book art as well as the wider world of reading and information cultures.

I am extremely interested in the machine as book, or reading machine, and how that has developed throughout history as well as how much potential it has now as an artistic device within my practice. I am also interested in how that relates to the current trends of e-reading."

So this is my attempt at a prototype reading machine. The idea came from thinking about how we now read and 'turn the pages' of articles or text on our smart phones and tablet devices; the way we swipe the touch-screens to move the text and read more. Ideally there would be several 'barrels' that you swipe with your hand to move all at once.

I have also, quite obviously, been influenced by Ramelli's Book Wheel and Daniel Libeskind's machines, both of which you can see images of in my 'reading machines' pinterest board.

This needs more work; and although I might go forward with it I also want to work through some smaller models/maquettes of other machine ideas...or even ideas that deal with the act of reading and how it might be changing....

Will keep you posted.