The gathering of collective memory. A pre-literate notion of memory, in a communal way, something commemorative rather than putting a memory in a container. What we thought it was going to be changed completely. We are in that way changing our memory of what it was supposed to be. What are you able to collect? Memories? Objects? People? A collection of texts and people, collecting and composing each other? Somehow it's not even important that we have all the knowledge, what's important is the living, generative sense of the collection.

reading/writing

Simon Browne

reading/writing

see also editing, typing

Reading and writing are interdependent; a written text exists to be read, and is based on a history of reading comprehension and processing, from the early stages of literacy (developing the ability to recognise separate characters), to reading complex texts that become references for things we write. In an operational sense, we also read what we write, as we’re writing it. So, the process of writing is combined with reading, and both gestures can be found in another word that blends the two acts together: editing. Writing, reading, editing; growing a tree while making a chair from its wood to sit on.


Image: Simon Browne, timed writing/editing experiment using Etherpad, collaborative text-editing software, 2018. The bars at the top indicate separate durations of 5-minute writing and 3-minute editing periods