Since the advent of media art, the chat has been anything but new as a model of alternative communication. As we know, commercial software from the big companies Yahoo and Microsoft and programs like ICQ and Skype led to the creation of a mammoth network in which the oh-so highly individualized customers pass on their private everyday experiences to their friends. The euphoria about these forms of communication that existed in the 1990s, particularly in the artistic context, has now been displaced by a feeling of banal ordinariness and a concrete perviousness of the conventional borders between private and public.
Ten years after the chat boom, and based not so much on cyber-euphoria as on the timeless pleasure in text itself, the project »Department of Reading« playfully appropriates the free program Skype as the interface for a new collective reading practice. In the Jan Van Eyck Academie, an exceptionally experimental and equally lonely post-graduate insitution in the Catholic city of Maastricht, the literary scholar Sönke Hallmann tried to organise a reading group, an attempt that fell flat mostly because of the highly individualized life rhythms of the international participants carrying out their art, design or theoretical projects in the academy. So this reading group received a virtual space in the form of a conference chat that slowly unfolded into a specific practice.
On the Web page of the DoR is written: »To display the act of reading in its potentiality, the Department of Reading explores how the tendency of the reader to comment and intervene in the text […] can be made public. One of the most urgent questions of the Department of Reading aims to address the collectiveness of reading and asks, in how far this collectivity is potentially already implied within a text.« A typical chat session of the DoR gathers together between five and thirty-five readers. These chats can take place with specific contexts in view, such as the Revolver Showroom in Frankfurt or the Smart Projects Space in Amsterdam – although the real event is always shifted to the virtual plane and participants join in from many parts of the world. The first big public staging of the Department of reading took place in the Kunstfabrik am Flutgraben in Berlin in December 2007. A strange simultaneity in which for the first time large groups of readers were assembled together at a single location. Reading sessions hosted by artists and theorists such as Tanja Widmann, Karolin Meunier, Inga Zimprich and Marina Vishmidt were projected on the wall in versions modified by programmers (Tsila Hassine, Michael Murtaugh, Gon Zifroni) that followed individual words on the Web per Google or mixed up echoes from various discussions in a 48-hour-long hyperchat text. The strange simultaneity of sitting live next to one another while only communicating in a chat created a double intimacy depending on the situation. I met every reader again virtually, but did not even know his or her chat name.
The focus is on the interface of reading. On reading and – writing. Every articulation becomes part of the hypertext of the reader’s reception. In the chats, a diverse field of explanatory commentaries and criticism, game and citation is developed. Excerpts from Agamben and Rancière, Derrida and Virno, but also Terre Thaemlitz and Franz Kafka have been discussed so far, and form a complex reservoir of discourses that interconnects issues of community and space, potentiality and text production, post-Fordism and technology critique. Discourses that reflect and structure the possibilities of the Department of Reading itself. Agamben’s theory of an excluded part of life whose potentiality profanes the division of exclusion and inclusion for a new Messianic time is an important reference for organiser Sönke Hallmann. He wants to create places that allow other forms of permanence in the motion between text and commentary to prepare a collective form of reception the dualism of author and reader. Motives of the uncanny and of a different division of presence and absence, of becoming imperceptible in a time of theory event hype, and the issue of the departure from an analogue relationship between reader and text are other indications of a different construction of public practice.
»We are always public,« according to Sönke Hallmann; at best, he says, we can use publicness in a different way and try out our own economy situationally between different forms of inside and outside. He describes how its potentiality can be tested by virtual comparison and consideration, somewhere between appearance and disappearance. There is a rare transparency throughout the website of the DoR, where one can find an archive and a wiki on created terminology, along with information on the next session and an invitation to simply open a Skype account and join in. People who virtually visit the chat, read and express themselves become part of the DoR’s test practice. This transparency is important to Hallmann – the specific coordinates of this rare collaboration between artists and theorists, programmers and people who have joined in out of spontaneous interest are updated in each session, which mostly take place with exclusively invited hosts. Nonetheless, the question of the conditions in which the reading community itself is embedded remains strangely unsolved. At the Berlin live staging of the »Symposium for Readers«, it sometimes happened that viewers came into the room only to disappear again on the spot. What is more mysterious than the impression made by nerds sitting at computers? And who, besides the initiated, feels targeted by this half-academic, half-experimental way of speaking? I too was invited to host a session in December in Berlin. The focus was on a rather theoretistic text by the electro-acoustic transgender artist Terre Thaemlitz. Interestingly, Thaemlitz’s polemic critique of the artistic context and the impossibility it describes of criticising this context in elitist and minority settings soon met its limits with the »Community of Readers«. Displaying impatience, a lack of understanding and little desire to follow the supposed provocation of this text, the collectively created hypertext of this reading session reads like a mixture of obstinacy and refusal to penetrate further into the deconstruction of its own conditions of discussion. A pity – for the question of what potential life is excluded in the Department of Reading itself will certainly descend on it often, like the Derridean guest who appears without prior announcement. It would be great if a place were set aside for him.

http://www.reading.department.cc/

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

---