The Readies (from Bob Brown to dj readies)

Abstract

I focused in this article on a precise example of a reading machine, a machine that probably never truly existed, but received however quite a lot of feedback, to the point that it became the center piece of a protest rhetoric. Those are Robert Carlton Brown’s Readies (1930). The desire to find new ways of capturing, preserving and transmitting texts has been a recurring feature throughout the 20th century. And the process intensified in the 21st century with the latest computer developments that have multiplied the reading surfaces, the touch pad and e-readers to more and more accurate screens of our computers. These new devices bring us into a culture of the screen that seems to sound the death knell of the book and its culture. However, this search for a technical device capable of competing with the codex was not done at once, it did not lead spontaneously to a functional model. The desire to renew the very instruments of reading has left many traces, projects of reading machines dead on the soap opera. These projects all concern a wish, that of renovating the techniques of conservation and dissemination of texts, as well as the very mechanisms of reading, which never evolves quickly enough. The careful examination of Brown's project, notably in it’s controversial resumption by Craig Saper, under the pseudonym dj readies, will make it possible to understand how reading machines, beyond their technical dimension, have important semiotic and symbolic implications.