Fibreculture Journal (Dec 2009)
Materiality of a simulation: Scratch reading machine, 1931
Abstract
Using Bob Brown's reading machine and the prepared texts for his machine, called readies, both designed in 1930, as an example of scratch turntablist techniques, suggests an alternative to narrow definitions of literacy and new ways to appreciate the history of scratch techniques. Brown's machine resembles the turntablist’s ability to rapidly shift reading (its direction, speed, and repetition) rather than slowly flipping the pages of a book. Punctuation marks, in the readies, become visual analogies. For movement we see em-dashes (—) that also, by definition, indicate that the sentence was interrupted or cut short. The old uses of punctuation, such as employment of periods to mark the end of a sentence, disappear. The result looks like a script for a turntablist’s performance, and dj Herc starts to sound like a reading teacher. An online simulation of Brown's machine, http://www.readies.org, reproduce, or approximate, the motion, scratch, jerking, flickering, and visual effects produced or illuminated with the machine. Those supplemental aspects of reading are always already part of reading. The supplement (movement, visuality, mechanicity) to traditional notions of literacy usually remain part of an implicate process. The reading machine and scratch techniques are not simply a new conduit for the same supposedly natural process. The scratch reading highlights what Jacques Derrida calls the "virtual multimedia" (of reading print) on paper. The increasing prevalence, even omnipresent and [to some critics] epidemic, use of text(ing) machines, something outside or beside traditional literacy, the scratch-meaning becomes foregrounded. Brown's machine puts the natural process of reading under erasure or scratch (simply by adjusting the speed, direction, and layout). dj Herc did the same for music.
