Extending the Forms of Reading: using the 'Walking Library'
by Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
by Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
Jane Bennett I Bevis Fenner I Belinda Mitchell I Yonat Nizan-Green I Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
Using Misha Myers and Dee Heddon’s peripatetic art project ‘Walking Library’ as a model, I suggested the research group to participate in an experimental reading and walking experience. As with Myers and Heddon, who were interested in exploring ideas around ‘ambulatory knowing’, I was intrigued to see how embodied actions and social situations could become meaningful as ‘fielding places’ (Heddon & Myers, 2014, p.641) to form new ways of engaging with text and knowledge making. I also wanted to understand better how the social aspect of ‘shared text’ affected the ways in which the text was read, interpreted, experienced and came into being to remain ‘open’ (Heddon and Myers, 2017, p.41). The idea of ‘openness’ was explored further by reading together Umberto Eco’s The Poetics of Open Work during the walk. Bevis and Belinda also brought with them other texts they shared along the way.
I had created a small notebook with texts extracted from the ‘Stories from the Walking Library’, a separate article written by Heddon and Myers describing their account of taking part in the Sideways Arts Festival in Belgium where the Walking Library first took shape. The notebook was there for everyone to take notes, draw, doodle, etc., whilst they walked, listened and observed. The route of the walk was not very long – Winchester Cathedral to University of Winchester. However, the area around the cathedral was busy with tourists and there was still much navigating to do even along the quieter back streets. Noises from the passing cars would drown the words being read out aloud, fragmenting the text. Still, there were some truly beautiful moments when the text and the environment came together as when Yonat read a passage on music and we heard music being played nearby. Or when Bevis read about the ‘golden hands of the sun’ as we felt the warm sun on our skins standing in the quiet cemetery. These were moments when the text, the situation and the physical experience all seemed to connect effortlessly.
As a peripatetic social art project, the Walking Library chooses their location and the books they take for the walks very carefully. The meticulous orchestration seemed a critical factor for such events to work successfully to provide meaningful levels of experience to explore how walking affects the experience of reading and to see how a walk can be regarded as a space of knowledge production. Reflecting back on our short, experimental walk, there were many things that didn’t quite work (the noisy and distracting route, the overly theoretical text, and my uncertainty in how to start the walk and to read) but there were lovely moments when the walking, reading, and the sharing of text opened up another space to think about the potentials of embodied knowledge making and expanded reading. The question of ‘openness’ also seemed to rely very much on the context and the content of the text as well as on how text was shared.
Reference
Eco, U. (1962) 'The Poetics of the Open Work' IN Bishop, C. (ed.) (2006) Participation. London: Whitechapel, 20 - 40.
Heddon, D. & Myers, M. (2014) 'Stories from the Walking Library', Cultural Geographies, Vol. 21 (4), 639 - 645.
Heddon, D. & Myers, M. (2017) 'The Walking Library: Mobilizing books, places, readers and reading', Performance Research: On Libraries, 22(1), January/February, 32-48.
Reflections and Feedbacks
Jane Bennett
Umberto Eco’s essay ‘The Open Work’ took us on an interesting journey through historical examples where a work of art remains an ‘open’ project. He explains (in beautifully clear language) how current thinking determines the structure and reception of works of art. He charts the history of how and why artists strive to achieve ‘openness’ in their work and what ideas drove those aims in different historical periods (eg medieval allegory, the fluid space of the Baroque, kinetic art’s mobility) in literature, art, performance and music.
He links the concept of ‘openness’ with the possibility of changing perceptions that reflect the way culture or science view reality, and cites the paradigm shift effected by the then current (1979) scientific thinking around quantum mechanics. As an example of the means to open up literature, he writes about Mallarmé’s vision of a multidimensional, deconstructed book which could open up new perspectives – the fore-runner, perhaps, of those 1980s children’s books where the reader chooses which of the multiple endings to read.
The openness of walking and reading taps into a different sensibility. It doesn’t provide a choice of endings but a choice of beings, a widening of the experience of reading that links the text with our physical, bodily experience of the world. In the group’s experiment, a we walked in random fashion with one member reading at a time, I lost the density of words and the complexity of Eco’s text and my hearing caught the odd phrase – Eco’s reference to music – that was magically echoed in the space we were passing through by a decorator’s radio. With my mind attuned to be alert to sound, I heard the engine noise of the buses and cars on the road ahead of us amplified in the narrow passageway as we climbed up the steps. Later, we listened to William Golding’s words about the burning heat of the sun whilst we were in the cool shade of trees and it felt wrong, so we listen to them again in the blazing hot field of the old cemetery and the words resonated with our bodily experience and we felt them as much as heard them.
The strange process of walking and reading allowed us, as in Eco’s words, “….to conceive the world in a fresh dynamics of potentiality before the fixative process of habit and familiarity comes into play”. (Eco, p16)
Yonat Nizan-Green
Text for Noriko’s ‘Stories from the Walking Library’ PIRG Reading and Walking Session July 2018
Yonat Nitzan-Green 26.7.2018
Cathedral’s bench
Stories from the Walking Library PIRG Reading and Walking Session
10th July 2018
Finding myself
Or
Getting lost?
Wind
Bird (was)
Words
(drawing)
תפקידים
Collaboration
Cooperation – more open
(drawing)
Southgate St.
Train rails
Bev: “I know where we are”
(drawing)
Knowing ‘as we go, not before we go’.
“Let them not make me
a stone”
Jane: Reading in the graveyard
The text and the landscape, both potentially fixed
Content, are unravelled and set in dynamic and
Unpredictable relationship by the peripatetic,
Unplanned and slow reading of the participants.
Reading out-loud theory + Poetry
Conversation
Reading “Too dark” material.
‘book and land are always in the process of singular
Formation – an occurrence rather than a given’
Reading out loud in various contexts on the
Move and at times of rest along the journey
Asserts a communal and bodily experience of
Reading and writing, forming a dialogue
Shared with those present and with those
Voices of the past that speak through the
Words read as if present.
2 people, on on top of the other
Are buried in one grave
(drawing)
Noriko: good to try the ‘walking
Library’. Choosing text is
Important.
What outcome emerges.
Jane: and the place.
Noriko: how do you qualify
Success
Jane: space for discovery
A rewriting prompted by walking.
Noriko talks about The Walking Library. She made a drawing
On a leaf.
How it felt – exploring (this time)
How different is it to walking
Out-door?
Belinda – similar. It’s about reading in movement.
Openness – didn’t write, but drew.
Through drawing became aware of
Fragmented experiences.
Like reading + walking, less hesitance
Of reading.
As text becomes read, remembered, shared and heard
‘along paths of movement’, the stories become interwoven
With an expanding multiplicity of others, offering space
For new stories to emerge, extending the path into the
Future.
Y. the table method – drawing,
Engagement with senses
+ text.
B. makes comparison + drawing
A diagram.
N. they found that poetry was
Good to read – rhythm
Tim Goldin – someone walking next
To you.
איך מתקשר למסקנה .Y
ענתה .N
J. reading out-loud
N. has an oral history
J. difficulty to hear
Noriko – reading + walking is hard
Having to navigate ...
How does it affect the reading
Bev – split – the text about music
+
Reading my own text –
Text as ambient music
Like ritual, then text became
Like cosmology
I read about cosmology
Yonat – opening to senses
Jane – like reading a “guide-book”
But it wasn’t, so sensation
Of experiencing two spaces
At the same time.
Belinda – realized her knowledge
About this place wasn’t
Accurate.
Y: last time I
With my
They were
Phenomenology
Imagination
Research
Group
was here
sons when toddlers
2018
Using Misha Myers and Dee Heddon’s peripatetic art project ‘Walking Library’ as a model, I suggested the research group to participate in an experimental reading and walking experience. As with Myers and Heddon, who were interested in exploring ideas around ‘ambulatory knowing’, I was intrigued to see how embodied actions and social situations could become meaningful as ‘fielding places’ (Heddon & Myers, 2014, p.641) to form new ways of engaging with text and knowledge making. I also wanted to understand better how the social aspect of ‘shared text’ affected the ways in which the text was read, interpreted, experienced and came into being to remain ‘open’ (Heddon and Myers, 2017, p.41). The idea of ‘openness’ was explored further by reading together Umberto Eco’s The Poetics of Open Work during the walk. Bevis and Belinda also brought with them other texts they shared along the way.
I had created a small notebook with texts extracted from the ‘Stories from the Walking Library’, a separate article written by Heddon and Myers describing their account of taking part in the Sideways Arts Festival in Belgium where the Walking Library first took shape. The notebook was there for everyone to take notes, draw, doodle, etc., whilst they walked, listened and observed. The route of the walk was not very long – Winchester Cathedral to University of Winchester. However, the area around the cathedral was busy with tourists and there was still much navigating to do even along the quieter back streets. Noises from the passing cars would drown the words being read out aloud, fragmenting the text. Still, there were some truly beautiful moments when the text and the environment came together as when Yonat read a passage on music and we heard music being played nearby. Or when Bevis read about the ‘golden hands of the sun’ as we felt the warm sun on our skins standing in the quiet cemetery. These were moments when the text, the situation and the physical experience all seemed to connect effortlessly.
As a peripatetic social art project, the Walking Library chooses their location and the books they take for the walks very carefully. The meticulous orchestration seemed a critical factor for such events to work successfully to provide meaningful levels of experience to explore how walking affects the experience of reading and to see how a walk can be regarded as a space of knowledge production. Reflecting back on our short, experimental walk, there were many things that didn’t quite work (the noisy and distracting route, the overly theoretical text, and my uncertainty in how to start the walk and to read) but there were lovely moments when the walking, reading, and the sharing of text opened up another space to think about the potentials of embodied knowledge making and expanded reading. The question of ‘openness’ also seemed to rely very much on the context and the content of the text as well as on how text was shared.
Reference
Eco, U. (1962) 'The Poetics of the Open Work' IN Bishop, C. (ed.) (2006) Participation. London: Whitechapel, 20 - 40.
Heddon, D. & Myers, M. (2014) 'Stories from the Walking Library', Cultural Geographies, Vol. 21 (4), 639 - 645.
Heddon, D. & Myers, M. (2017) 'The Walking Library: Mobilizing books, places, readers and reading', Performance Research: On Libraries, 22(1), January/February, 32-48.
Reflections and Feedbacks
Jane Bennett
Umberto Eco’s essay ‘The Open Work’ took us on an interesting journey through historical examples where a work of art remains an ‘open’ project. He explains (in beautifully clear language) how current thinking determines the structure and reception of works of art. He charts the history of how and why artists strive to achieve ‘openness’ in their work and what ideas drove those aims in different historical periods (eg medieval allegory, the fluid space of the Baroque, kinetic art’s mobility) in literature, art, performance and music.
He links the concept of ‘openness’ with the possibility of changing perceptions that reflect the way culture or science view reality, and cites the paradigm shift effected by the then current (1979) scientific thinking around quantum mechanics. As an example of the means to open up literature, he writes about Mallarmé’s vision of a multidimensional, deconstructed book which could open up new perspectives – the fore-runner, perhaps, of those 1980s children’s books where the reader chooses which of the multiple endings to read.
The openness of walking and reading taps into a different sensibility. It doesn’t provide a choice of endings but a choice of beings, a widening of the experience of reading that links the text with our physical, bodily experience of the world. In the group’s experiment, a we walked in random fashion with one member reading at a time, I lost the density of words and the complexity of Eco’s text and my hearing caught the odd phrase – Eco’s reference to music – that was magically echoed in the space we were passing through by a decorator’s radio. With my mind attuned to be alert to sound, I heard the engine noise of the buses and cars on the road ahead of us amplified in the narrow passageway as we climbed up the steps. Later, we listened to William Golding’s words about the burning heat of the sun whilst we were in the cool shade of trees and it felt wrong, so we listen to them again in the blazing hot field of the old cemetery and the words resonated with our bodily experience and we felt them as much as heard them.
The strange process of walking and reading allowed us, as in Eco’s words, “….to conceive the world in a fresh dynamics of potentiality before the fixative process of habit and familiarity comes into play”. (Eco, p16)
Yonat Nizan-Green
Text for Noriko’s ‘Stories from the Walking Library’ PIRG Reading and Walking Session July 2018
Yonat Nitzan-Green 26.7.2018
Cathedral’s bench
Stories from the Walking Library PIRG Reading and Walking Session
10th July 2018
Finding myself
Or
Getting lost?
Wind
Bird (was)
Words
(drawing)
תפקידים
Collaboration
Cooperation – more open
(drawing)
Southgate St.
Train rails
Bev: “I know where we are”
(drawing)
Knowing ‘as we go, not before we go’.
“Let them not make me
a stone”
Jane: Reading in the graveyard
The text and the landscape, both potentially fixed
Content, are unravelled and set in dynamic and
Unpredictable relationship by the peripatetic,
Unplanned and slow reading of the participants.
Reading out-loud theory + Poetry
Conversation
Reading “Too dark” material.
‘book and land are always in the process of singular
Formation – an occurrence rather than a given’
Reading out loud in various contexts on the
Move and at times of rest along the journey
Asserts a communal and bodily experience of
Reading and writing, forming a dialogue
Shared with those present and with those
Voices of the past that speak through the
Words read as if present.
2 people, on on top of the other
Are buried in one grave
(drawing)
Noriko: good to try the ‘walking
Library’. Choosing text is
Important.
What outcome emerges.
Jane: and the place.
Noriko: how do you qualify
Success
Jane: space for discovery
A rewriting prompted by walking.
Noriko talks about The Walking Library. She made a drawing
On a leaf.
How it felt – exploring (this time)
How different is it to walking
Out-door?
Belinda – similar. It’s about reading in movement.
Openness – didn’t write, but drew.
Through drawing became aware of
Fragmented experiences.
Like reading + walking, less hesitance
Of reading.
As text becomes read, remembered, shared and heard
‘along paths of movement’, the stories become interwoven
With an expanding multiplicity of others, offering space
For new stories to emerge, extending the path into the
Future.
Y. the table method – drawing,
Engagement with senses
+ text.
B. makes comparison + drawing
A diagram.
N. they found that poetry was
Good to read – rhythm
Tim Goldin – someone walking next
To you.
איך מתקשר למסקנה .Y
ענתה .N
J. reading out-loud
N. has an oral history
J. difficulty to hear
Noriko – reading + walking is hard
Having to navigate ...
How does it affect the reading
Bev – split – the text about music
+
Reading my own text –
Text as ambient music
Like ritual, then text became
Like cosmology
I read about cosmology
Yonat – opening to senses
Jane – like reading a “guide-book”
But it wasn’t, so sensation
Of experiencing two spaces
At the same time.
Belinda – realized her knowledge
About this place wasn’t
Accurate.
Y: last time I
With my
They were
Phenomenology
Imagination
Research
Group
was here
sons when toddlers
2018
