'Reading paths, eye-drawings and word islands' is an artistic-scientific cooperation with professor Johan Wagemans and postdoctoral researcher Frouke Hermens (Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven) (Concept summer 2010. Start January 2011-...)

Eye-movements registered during reading can be represented in different ways: animations, heat maps, in static and dynamic figures. From an artistic point of view these representations make up a rich source of images. But they are also food for thought on reading as a physical activity and reading as a mental and intellectual process in time, the relationship between reading and looking at, and textual and visual or formal properties. We also wonder if something could be said about the forking of the imagination. In a first phase of this project, we work with the poem 'Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard' (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. The poem is an intriguing example of a-linear writing, of typographic playing with ‘white’ and ‘space’, and of interweaving different reading lines and reading directions. This leads to special reading paths and ‘eye-drawings'. In the solo-exhibition 'On the unity and multiplicity of the book’ (Ruth Loos 2011) a first result / creation is shown. It is an animation that intertwines two spontaneous readings of the poem, a horizontal one and a vertical one. This shows how the poem evokes different ways of reading; reading paths as a source of multiple meaning. In addition to the original work of Mallarmé, Marcel Broodthaers artist's book by the same name is shown. Broodthaers’ book responds in a very special way to the typography of Mallarmé’s hermetic poem.
To be continued.