today I’m here to introduce you to one
of the most important media figures of
the 20th century that you’ve never heard
of his name is Bob Brown and his CV puts
most people’s in this room with all due
respect to shame he was at various
points in his career a best-selling pulp
fiction and film writer an inventor an
editor he was a stockbroker he was the
owner operator of a South American
publishing Empire he was a political
radical and an exile he was also an
educator but in my field English
literary studies he’s best known as the
avant-garde poet of the Lost Generation
American exile who were working in
various parts of France in the 20s and
30s to affect a revolution of the word
I’m not going to talk to you about Bob
Brown’s whole life today rather I’m
going to focus on the invention that
dominated it Bob Browns reading machine
so Brown believed that if you
revolutionized the act of reading that
you could affect a revolution of the
word which would be inkless Lee achieved
so Brown was profoundly frustrated that
whereas in cinema the talkies had been
introduced in 1928 and that completely
transformed the way that people
interacted with moving images but in the
field of print production in the field
of writing and literature technology was
at a standstill and for Brown this was
completely unsatisfactory film had given
us the talkies he was going to give us
the Reedy’s and this was a modern moving
word spectacle in time with our day so
his big idea really was that there was a
convergence happening between literary
experiment and technological experiment
a machine could unite these two moments
of culture and produce a complete
transformation in our media landscape
people could carry entire libraries of
information around with them and use
that knowledge to affect social change
so what was the magic device that was
gonna do all this well that was the
reading machine that’s this slightly
ramshackle contraption you can see up
here this is a prototype that he built
with the American expatriate artist Ross
Saunders in 1930 to 1931 and the machine
itself was a fairly simple idea it’s a
form of machine assisted speed reading
that would allow you to devour in an
entire hundred thousand word novel in a
single sitting that might have been a
bit ambitious what this machine did
though was very basically that it had a
top here a little enclosure where a
gramophone motor was stored it drove two
reels here which he pilfered from some
stock market tickers on those reels was
a medium in this case probably paper but
he imagined something akin to microfilm
where you had Micro graphically printed
text that would stream up through an
aperture here across a reading scream
that would magnify that miniature text
and bring it up to a comfortable reading
size the take-up reel would return the
Reedy to its pill-box like container you
pop it in the enclosure here and off you
go
you’ve revolutionized the word so
because of Browns association with the
Dada movement a lot of scholars think
that this machine probably never really
worked and what’s more it was never
really intended to work it was a
conceptual piece designed to challenge
our ideas about what reading was and
what it could do and I happen to agree
with that to a point however I think
that functionality was really important
to Bob Browns aesthetic I also think
that the reading machine even this
prototype here fits just as neatly into
the tradition of patent models as it
does into the tradition of avant-garde
Dada ready-mades
so a side-by-side comparison with a
Royal portable typewriter state of the
art in 1930 gives you a real sense of
the design aesthetic that they were
chasing the reels here closely
correspond to the typewriter ribbons
sort of dramatically showcased at the
top of the
unit here and I believe that’s entirely
deliberate Ross Saunders was not just an
artist he was a fully qualified engineer
he had the parts he had the chops to
build this thing and to make it work so
my sense of this device was that yes it
did work it was part of a revolution in
consumer information technology that was
sweeping the marketplace around this
time but that is only scratching the
surface of what they thought this
machine could do here Saunders sketched
out a prototype that looks eerily like a
laptop computer and it’s no coincidence
that Braun is today known as the
godfather of the e-reader the mechanism
is again very similar you got your Reedy
reels here you’ve got your reading
screen up here and you pop open the lid
to load in the Reedy’s medium and boom
off you go you’ve got a laptop microfilm
reader in 1930 but again this is a very
simple machine assisted speed reading
design brown’s ambition for this vastly
exceeded it he imagined a media ecology
that would allow you to completely
revolutionize what you could do with
language as well as make it more
efficient but how is he going to achieve
this who is he going to get to help
showcase this new language well as it
turns out he knew a few famous
modernists including Gertrude Stein Ezra
Pound the founder of the Italian
futurist movement Ft Marinette II as
well as the American dr. poet William
Carlos Williams and together they helped
Brown imagine what this new reading
medium could do and what it would look
like the book was called Reedy’s for Bob
Browns machine was an anthology that
looked like just about any other book
printed with standard printing equipment
but the results were nothing like a
standard text and this is what they
looked like
here Browns writing about another poet
who engaged with printing technology
Stephen Crane whose typewritten black
riders galloped across blank pages
and he writes here Stephen cranes black
riders crashed by hell-bent for leather
upper case lower case both together
chanting valorously print in action at
long last movable type at breakneck
gallop so the pace of the read ease
immediately brings to mind the speed
reading effect which Brown achieves by
removing many direct articles
conjunctions other elements of language
that he thought were superfluous except
he doesn’t entirely do away with them
using his weapon of choice the – he
suggests their presence while also
creating an illusion of forward motion
again this is only a prototype he
imagines that the Reedy’s could do a lot
more than that for example he imagined
that the reading medium could become a
three-dimensional process that you could
interact with birds of words would
alight chirping on his hands in a kind
of vision of early augmented reality
where he could manipulate electronic
text with your bare hands again the
modernist right-hand writer’s helped him
create this invention and he imagined
also that using emoticons or early
versions of emoticons could help expand
the vocabulary of the written word as
well as compress it and he was right
this is exactly the direction that many
forms of electronic communication took
today including text messaging and the
Twittersphere and he was so right so
often because he associated with a lot
of leading innovations in the day
including hands-free interfaces the
theremin had just been invented in 1928
so why not instead of waving your hands
in front of antenna to produce spooky
sci-fi music why not instead control
your reading machine with that in an
early form of gesture control interface
and what if you want to read at night
well newly available radioactivity
active materials could allow printing in
radium ink I cannot see a downside there
one of the most important innovations
that Brown had however was the
engagement with the television he
Televisa creedy’s reading matter he
predicted will be radioed and words
eventually will be recorded directly
onto the palpitating ether so he’s
imagining a wireless network a hyperlink
database that users could stream
directly to their portable device an
extraordinary prediction of exactly the
future direction that this technology
would take he also conflated a
technological device with a publishing
platform bypassing the sensor in the
process now this produced some
extraordinary avant-garde writing the
likes of which would not be seen until
the 1960s and 70s but it also produced
the 1930s equivalent of trolling were
extraordinary ramps using shocking
language even for the day were produced
alongside these modernist masterpieces
Brown’s media environment facilitated
both approaches unfortunately the
reading machine was a little too far
ahead of its time some of the parts just
wouldn’t work including the translucent
medium also the stock market crash the
final one of 1932 really did depress the
financial prospects for building a new
high risk piece of technology like this
so the story goes that the revolution of
the word ended here all the expatriates
went back home to America the tails
between their legs and the revolution of
the word slowly died and along with it
the reading machine which after a
last-ditch attempt to sell it to the
Russians Bob Brown and his wife Rose
eventually abandoned except that that’s
not completely true what actually
happened was that they returned to New
York and reevaluated their entire
careers they decided that instead of
using the reading machine as a kind of
avant-garde experiment or even a
get-rich-quick scheme they decided to
transform it into an instrument for
social change because they had become
committed socialist activists who like
many writers of the day eventually
joined the Communist Party and they
reimagined the reading machine as his
device that would provide libraries of
information for workers in order to help
ferment the kind
social change that they felt
depression-era America desperately
needed they also worked with some of the
leading information
leading designers of the new microfilm
technology that was coming onto the
market in the mid 30s however their
politics put them completely at odds
with the direction the field was going
where the industry was producing
gigantic machines that cost a fortune
and only major corporations and
libraries could afford the Browns
insisted on keeping the information
cheap accessible and portable mobile so
it might be now that the Browns time has
finally come
his biographer Craig saber has produced
an online version of the Reedy’s which
allows you to view the original Reedy’s
anthology at Reedy’s org as Brown
originally imagined it at Oxford Brookes
University the Avant Garde’s and
speculative technology project which
includes myself my colleagues Friedel
and wild and John twycross have really
taken up Bob Browns speculative
technology ideas and created an
augmented reality reading machine where
texts erupt from landscapes in
Oxfordshire and working with the
experiment experimental writer Ian
Sinclair we’ve attempted to hack the
language that various organizations use
in the city to dominate it and to divide
it so by playfully but seriously
subverting that language were attempting
to challenge those kind of discourses
and following Bob Brown’s trajectory
we’re now transforming that avant-garde
experiment into a potential tool for
Sofia social change so we’ve reached out
to a number of youth groups in Oxford
who represent marginalized communities
and together with maker groups based at
Oxford County Libraries we’re building
augmented reality reading machines
together so our attempt here is to write
our community into these narratives to
write through and around them using
technology that these groups are in
control of and so we
this is the kind of project that brown
might have envisaged when he originally
designed the Reedy’s we hope that we are
together with our community challenging
the impulse to sleepwalk into a new
media ecology that’s just around the
corner and one of the lessons we’ve all
learned from building these new
augmented reality reading machines is
that the futures future is sometimes in
the past thanks very much
[Applause]
of the most important media figures of
the 20th century that you’ve never heard
of his name is Bob Brown and his CV puts
most people’s in this room with all due
respect to shame he was at various
points in his career a best-selling pulp
fiction and film writer an inventor an
editor he was a stockbroker he was the
owner operator of a South American
publishing Empire he was a political
radical and an exile he was also an
educator but in my field English
literary studies he’s best known as the
avant-garde poet of the Lost Generation
American exile who were working in
various parts of France in the 20s and
30s to affect a revolution of the word
I’m not going to talk to you about Bob
Brown’s whole life today rather I’m
going to focus on the invention that
dominated it Bob Browns reading machine
so Brown believed that if you
revolutionized the act of reading that
you could affect a revolution of the
word which would be inkless Lee achieved
so Brown was profoundly frustrated that
whereas in cinema the talkies had been
introduced in 1928 and that completely
transformed the way that people
interacted with moving images but in the
field of print production in the field
of writing and literature technology was
at a standstill and for Brown this was
completely unsatisfactory film had given
us the talkies he was going to give us
the Reedy’s and this was a modern moving
word spectacle in time with our day so
his big idea really was that there was a
convergence happening between literary
experiment and technological experiment
a machine could unite these two moments
of culture and produce a complete
transformation in our media landscape
people could carry entire libraries of
information around with them and use
that knowledge to affect social change
so what was the magic device that was
gonna do all this well that was the
reading machine that’s this slightly
ramshackle contraption you can see up
here this is a prototype that he built
with the American expatriate artist Ross
Saunders in 1930 to 1931 and the machine
itself was a fairly simple idea it’s a
form of machine assisted speed reading
that would allow you to devour in an
entire hundred thousand word novel in a
single sitting that might have been a
bit ambitious what this machine did
though was very basically that it had a
top here a little enclosure where a
gramophone motor was stored it drove two
reels here which he pilfered from some
stock market tickers on those reels was
a medium in this case probably paper but
he imagined something akin to microfilm
where you had Micro graphically printed
text that would stream up through an
aperture here across a reading scream
that would magnify that miniature text
and bring it up to a comfortable reading
size the take-up reel would return the
Reedy to its pill-box like container you
pop it in the enclosure here and off you
go
you’ve revolutionized the word so
because of Browns association with the
Dada movement a lot of scholars think
that this machine probably never really
worked and what’s more it was never
really intended to work it was a
conceptual piece designed to challenge
our ideas about what reading was and
what it could do and I happen to agree
with that to a point however I think
that functionality was really important
to Bob Browns aesthetic I also think
that the reading machine even this
prototype here fits just as neatly into
the tradition of patent models as it
does into the tradition of avant-garde
Dada ready-mades
so a side-by-side comparison with a
Royal portable typewriter state of the
art in 1930 gives you a real sense of
the design aesthetic that they were
chasing the reels here closely
correspond to the typewriter ribbons
sort of dramatically showcased at the
top of the
unit here and I believe that’s entirely
deliberate Ross Saunders was not just an
artist he was a fully qualified engineer
he had the parts he had the chops to
build this thing and to make it work so
my sense of this device was that yes it
did work it was part of a revolution in
consumer information technology that was
sweeping the marketplace around this
time but that is only scratching the
surface of what they thought this
machine could do here Saunders sketched
out a prototype that looks eerily like a
laptop computer and it’s no coincidence
that Braun is today known as the
godfather of the e-reader the mechanism
is again very similar you got your Reedy
reels here you’ve got your reading
screen up here and you pop open the lid
to load in the Reedy’s medium and boom
off you go you’ve got a laptop microfilm
reader in 1930 but again this is a very
simple machine assisted speed reading
design brown’s ambition for this vastly
exceeded it he imagined a media ecology
that would allow you to completely
revolutionize what you could do with
language as well as make it more
efficient but how is he going to achieve
this who is he going to get to help
showcase this new language well as it
turns out he knew a few famous
modernists including Gertrude Stein Ezra
Pound the founder of the Italian
futurist movement Ft Marinette II as
well as the American dr. poet William
Carlos Williams and together they helped
Brown imagine what this new reading
medium could do and what it would look
like the book was called Reedy’s for Bob
Browns machine was an anthology that
looked like just about any other book
printed with standard printing equipment
but the results were nothing like a
standard text and this is what they
looked like
here Browns writing about another poet
who engaged with printing technology
Stephen Crane whose typewritten black
riders galloped across blank pages
and he writes here Stephen cranes black
riders crashed by hell-bent for leather
upper case lower case both together
chanting valorously print in action at
long last movable type at breakneck
gallop so the pace of the read ease
immediately brings to mind the speed
reading effect which Brown achieves by
removing many direct articles
conjunctions other elements of language
that he thought were superfluous except
he doesn’t entirely do away with them
using his weapon of choice the – he
suggests their presence while also
creating an illusion of forward motion
again this is only a prototype he
imagines that the Reedy’s could do a lot
more than that for example he imagined
that the reading medium could become a
three-dimensional process that you could
interact with birds of words would
alight chirping on his hands in a kind
of vision of early augmented reality
where he could manipulate electronic
text with your bare hands again the
modernist right-hand writer’s helped him
create this invention and he imagined
also that using emoticons or early
versions of emoticons could help expand
the vocabulary of the written word as
well as compress it and he was right
this is exactly the direction that many
forms of electronic communication took
today including text messaging and the
Twittersphere and he was so right so
often because he associated with a lot
of leading innovations in the day
including hands-free interfaces the
theremin had just been invented in 1928
so why not instead of waving your hands
in front of antenna to produce spooky
sci-fi music why not instead control
your reading machine with that in an
early form of gesture control interface
and what if you want to read at night
well newly available radioactivity
active materials could allow printing in
radium ink I cannot see a downside there
one of the most important innovations
that Brown had however was the
engagement with the television he
Televisa creedy’s reading matter he
predicted will be radioed and words
eventually will be recorded directly
onto the palpitating ether so he’s
imagining a wireless network a hyperlink
database that users could stream
directly to their portable device an
extraordinary prediction of exactly the
future direction that this technology
would take he also conflated a
technological device with a publishing
platform bypassing the sensor in the
process now this produced some
extraordinary avant-garde writing the
likes of which would not be seen until
the 1960s and 70s but it also produced
the 1930s equivalent of trolling were
extraordinary ramps using shocking
language even for the day were produced
alongside these modernist masterpieces
Brown’s media environment facilitated
both approaches unfortunately the
reading machine was a little too far
ahead of its time some of the parts just
wouldn’t work including the translucent
medium also the stock market crash the
final one of 1932 really did depress the
financial prospects for building a new
high risk piece of technology like this
so the story goes that the revolution of
the word ended here all the expatriates
went back home to America the tails
between their legs and the revolution of
the word slowly died and along with it
the reading machine which after a
last-ditch attempt to sell it to the
Russians Bob Brown and his wife Rose
eventually abandoned except that that’s
not completely true what actually
happened was that they returned to New
York and reevaluated their entire
careers they decided that instead of
using the reading machine as a kind of
avant-garde experiment or even a
get-rich-quick scheme they decided to
transform it into an instrument for
social change because they had become
committed socialist activists who like
many writers of the day eventually
joined the Communist Party and they
reimagined the reading machine as his
device that would provide libraries of
information for workers in order to help
ferment the kind
social change that they felt
depression-era America desperately
needed they also worked with some of the
leading information
leading designers of the new microfilm
technology that was coming onto the
market in the mid 30s however their
politics put them completely at odds
with the direction the field was going
where the industry was producing
gigantic machines that cost a fortune
and only major corporations and
libraries could afford the Browns
insisted on keeping the information
cheap accessible and portable mobile so
it might be now that the Browns time has
finally come
his biographer Craig saber has produced
an online version of the Reedy’s which
allows you to view the original Reedy’s
anthology at Reedy’s org as Brown
originally imagined it at Oxford Brookes
University the Avant Garde’s and
speculative technology project which
includes myself my colleagues Friedel
and wild and John twycross have really
taken up Bob Browns speculative
technology ideas and created an
augmented reality reading machine where
texts erupt from landscapes in
Oxfordshire and working with the
experiment experimental writer Ian
Sinclair we’ve attempted to hack the
language that various organizations use
in the city to dominate it and to divide
it so by playfully but seriously
subverting that language were attempting
to challenge those kind of discourses
and following Bob Brown’s trajectory
we’re now transforming that avant-garde
experiment into a potential tool for
Sofia social change so we’ve reached out
to a number of youth groups in Oxford
who represent marginalized communities
and together with maker groups based at
Oxford County Libraries we’re building
augmented reality reading machines
together so our attempt here is to write
our community into these narratives to
write through and around them using
technology that these groups are in
control of and so we
this is the kind of project that brown
might have envisaged when he originally
designed the Reedy’s we hope that we are
together with our community challenging
the impulse to sleepwalk into a new
media ecology that’s just around the
corner and one of the lessons we’ve all
learned from building these new
augmented reality reading machines is
that the futures future is sometimes in
the past thanks very much
[Applause]
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