Reading Machines, 1937

[anna balint]

[i don't know where did Heiko Idensen found this detail among Raymond Rousell's projects
 - and an illustration as well of it (http://www.hyperdis.de/txt/) - but it's very interesting.  
When we have so many text, image and sound generators, so many historical combinatoric 
poetry and image machine was realised on the web, and new ones were invented for new contexts - we did 
not invent the adequate reading and digesting machine... it would be fun
to have a net variant of this machine too. 
does anyone have an echelon-like, keyword based
script on the desktop, which points to interesting readings on the web - or such script is the priviledge
of search engines? if there are alternatve browsers, why are there not alternative search engines,
which would give exclusively results related to net.art for instance? 
time based art generator projects are a bit different,  it takes some seconds to get the 
music variants played for instance in the case of Mozart's Muzikalisches Wurfelspiel,
and one can listen consequently all the 126 variants.
http://www.shocknet.org.uk/music/mdg.htm  greetings,  anna]



Reading Machines (1937)

Raymond Roussel wanted to make his involved interlocking texts, nested to
the ninth degree with endless series of ennumerations, digressions, footnotes
and parenthetical expressions, more clearly readable with different colored
print - in 1932, however, his publishers rejected such a complicated procedure.
Then in a surrealist exhibition in 1937 a "Roussel Reading Machine" was shown,
for which the text is mounted on cardboard like a kind of circular index: the
upper edge is marked with a different color depending on the degree of nesting.
The cards are mounted on the axis of a drum that the reader can turn with the
right hand using a handle, while holding the desired text card by a protruding 
colored marking with the left, so that the text cards that belong together (on
a certain nesting level) can be turned one after another.
Throughout the course of literature innumerable conceptual (virtual) poetry machines, 
combinatorics devices and narrative concepts have been designed,
which require an active reader - because of separations due to production
technology and the fundamentally different media conditions for authors and
readers, however, it has rarely been possible to evoke "truly" poetic activity
on the part of the reader...