“Texts are written by those who read them” | participative cross-media installation

| “Texts are written by those who read them” is a participative cross-media installation, exhibited @ WASP in Bucharest, Romania.
| EN

“Lato sensu, no-et-ic comes from the Greek noësis | noëtikos, meaning inner wisdom, direct knowing or subjective understanding. Our manifesto for noetic art, is therefore, an inner journey towards subjective and cognitive relocation. Being part of the “Jardin d’Europe” playground, what we aim to convey is an installation-experiment that fully relocates European classic literature’s abandoned oeuvres into interactive neo-personal games.

In 2012, Biblioteca Adevarul decided to relaunch a collection of classic books, however, due to the lack of interest of the young generations for printed books, many of the classic Dostoievskian, Shakespeareian or Julesverneian fairytale-dramas ended up in a Carrefour dusty shelf, being evaluated to less than 10 eurocents.
By reconfiguring their narrative substance and by transforming the original text into subjective surreal neo-poems / personal key-phrases / diary notes, we intend to bring them back from the Carrefour dusty shelves to the contemporary gallery.

The concept of meaning-relocation by using markers as creative erasers was firstly started by Austin Kleon, the author of newspaper-blackout-poetry. Taking his experiment as a technical premise, we decided to enrich it with the contemporary context of abandoned printed literature, with a neo-mechanism of explore interactive reading and with a honest manifesto for a Newer Wave of Romanian and European Literature. We hereby try to fully expand the meaning- relocation challenge by observing how the same static text can become a dynamic set of relocations, when shaped by different persons. The distant readers are invited to interact with the same text, to select, dismiss or recontextualize words or key-phrases into a new personal oeuvre.

What we aim as an open result is an immersive collection of noetic cross-literatures, a collection of pluri-perspectives – leading to a more general observation of how only one page of text can generate a multitude of personal layers. We want to question the concept of a reader’s “perception” and to challenge its boundaries. How flexible can a text be, without losing its core essence? What is its core essence – objectifying it or creatively subjectifying it? Semiotics-wise, we are fascinated by how opposite words and contexts combined, juxtaposed or relocated, can create a whole new convention. The participative experiment reveals a collective set of textual patterns that evolves from a distant approach to a very personal, trans-intimate involvement, culminating in the end with a more universal understanding of our own senses, perception, memory and beyond.

If Marcel Duchap used to say “paintings are made by those who look at them”, we are now daring to say “texts are written by those who read them”. We encourage you to play with participative reading and to immerse yourself into the borderlessness of creative re-writing. Dare to explore, dare to re-define!

Grab a marker and FADE IN your own inner statement into our collective imagination !”

| an interactive installation explored by Ioana Mischie

| Supported by WASP – Working Art Space and Production & STORYSCAPES

| with the immense support of Sorin Baican, Ana Florea, Alina Negoiţă, Marcel Duchamp