25-03 2017 – 17:30
Lecture: Story Generator of Ana Torfs by Christophe Van Gerrewey [NL]
The ideal reader
In his book S/Z of 1970, Roland Bathes writes: ‘Did it never happen to you, as you were reading a book, to stop reading, not because you weren’t interested, on the contrary, but because of a flow of ideas, stimuli and associations? In a word, did it never happen to you to read while looking up from your book? It is such reading, at once insolent in that it interrupts the text, and passionate, in that it keeps returning to it and feeding on it, which I tried to write.’ According to Barthes, such reading is characteristic of the ideal reader – a reader whose existence is also at least being suggested by Story Generator of Ana Torfs. Story Generator is an appliance, a device, a “machine à lire” of a very specific, circular and double-sided form that not only harks back to the rich history of reading (and everything that goes with it), but that may also point to more contemporary or future forms of knowledge acquisition and reading.
Christophe Van Gerrewey is the author of the collection of essays Over alles en voor iedereen and the novels Op de hoogte (Up to Date) and Trein met vertraging. His third novel, Werk werk werk, will be published in the autumn of 2017. He publishes about literature and art in magazines such as De Witte Raaf, De Gids and DWB, and is Professor in Architectural Theory at the EPFL in Lausanne.”
Ana Torfs has invited a writer (Christophe Van Gerrewey), a philosopher (Emiliano Battista) and an artist (Vincent Meessen) to revisit her story machine, “Story Generator”, in order to create endless spin-offs.
09-11 2016 – 18:30 @ CENTRALE by Vincent Meessen [FR] – 5 €
18-01 2017 – 18:30 @ CENTRALE by Emiliano Battista [EN] – 5 €
25-03 2017 – 17:30 @ CENTRALE by Christophe Van Gerrewey [NL] in association with Passaport ( www.passaporta.be)
“La liseuse des romans”, Antoine Wiertz, 1853
Events
