Ordeal

We are swimming in the shipwreck of visual indulgence. Problems present themselves which beg to be addressed. These problems are bewilderingly simple but at the same time they can be incredible design platforms. Platforms with allow us to tinker with the basics, ticker with the pure and basic forms of media and records. How do we read? In the noise of the page, the interface between the communicated word becomes the transmitted word and reaches us, which interventions can be staged to make it possible to read? Read as we choose: deeply, analytically or performatively. Because as a function our system finds it most difficult to conduct the elementary task of reading text now. How is text compiled into the same bitstream of continuous stimuli that other not just other media, but other modes of information processing provide? Reading text has become a visual process involving scanning, looking and seeking. It is so unsatisfactory and abstract a process now that we need to apply the mechanics of reading to media like film, music and video games.

Processes like analysis, an intrinsic part of the above-mentioned mechanics of reading, expands to become an activity in itself. Such an activity has little if anything to do with reading anymore. It has become a more abstract activity, a activity that has more to do with shape shifting the syntactic and semantic values of text than the text itself. Reading itself has now become a boutique activity which has luxury and indulgence snogged within it.

The ordeals of dealing with text, leaving everything to impoverished imaginations requires to be frequently placated with distractions and soothing interruptions. To such a degree that reading as a function cannot operate with the rhythmic pulses of interruptions. The normal of the reading activity is the vitiated, disrupted graph that includes the inside and the outside, the positive as well as negative space of the activity.