Saturday, May 31, 2008

I'm ready for new Readies

The remarkable Craig Saper has created some 21st-century-style "Readies", modeled on the modernist Readies of Bob Brown (1930), about which I have a huge personal interest.

"The reading machine," Craig writes, "is a toy that will appeal to a handful of modernist and media scholars, Bob Brown's heirs, and a few others. This project includes a few of the iterations; one can appreciate either of the last two iterations as the culmination of the project. The scholars and those interested in the particular writers in the Readies anthology will find iteration 3 particularly useful, but not yet complete. Iteration 4 is more for those seeking a futurist-thrill-poetry-ride-background-noise."

(Apparently at this point the machine only works with Windows/Firefox. It will also work with a Mac running Firefox but not with Safari.)

Craig is Professor of Texts and Technology in the English Department at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Networked Art (2001) and Artificial Mythologies (1997), both published by the University of Minnesota Press. He taught at Penn and has presented (on Fluxus) at the Writers House.