Common Tongues remediates practices and processes of reading, and addresses, critically, the commodification of reading itself, and the proprietary enclosure of a growing portion of our linguistic cultural commons.

Common Tongues emerges from the artists’ collaboration on The Readers Project (http://thereadersproject.org). Processes that were developed in this framework and that are based, in part, on previous manifestations of the Project are applied to a reading of Samuel Beckett’s How It Isand used to generate new poetic texts, remediating social reading.

The traces and consequences of others’ readings are accessible to us over the internet and, more recently, through networked ebook readers. The indexing and statistical analysis of everything that has been inscribed into the realm of big data allows us to search and retrieve textual fragments from a vast, increasingly comprehensive literary and linguistic corpus in arrangements that are first ‘read’ by algorithmic and statistical models and then offered up to us in finely composed—and often illustrated, multimediated—pages that precede and predetermine any further or deeper ‘human’ reading. Perhaps this is how we are now inclined to read, as our relationship with language and language-making changes fundamentally? Is the algorithmically composed reading ‘social’ or ‘posthuman’? Is our subsequent ‘deep’ reading a solipsistic throwback? For works that have been written by human individuals, questions of ownership, copyright and integrity are raised continually in entirely new, if instantly commonplace, situations.

Common Tongues

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