Like any medium, reading is a relational activity. It cannot properly be understood by looking only at the reader nor the thing read. This research seeks to hold together two understandings of reading: one, a long historical arc in which reading is conditioned by the technologies of print and text distribution, set and setting; and the other in which these apparatuses come into focus within the specific (bodily) experience of readerly pleasure. As such, it combines historical research with practical and embodied experiments around changing print technologies, set and setting. By exploring the phenomenon of reading through four distinct case studies, we seek to understand how the practice has changed over time, how it is technically mediated, and how the pleasures (and risks) it entails have transformed at key historical moments.

Linking these four examples is a continual evocation of virality and disease. New reading practices are frequently derided as sicknesses. To link reading with virality emphasises the project’s key concerns: distribution, environmental factors, and the body. We are interested in this conflation, since it emphasises that reading is not merely an idle pleasure but a potentially contagious and disruptive force.

Through a series of communally printed publications, a seminar, and a dedicated exhibition The Reading of Pleasure seeks to take reading seriously as an artistic medium: one that is messy, communal, and productive, and like any medium has its own material technologies, settings, and pleasures.