Reading Machines

The interdisciplinary honors seminar Reading Machines, led by Dr. Paul Fyfe, offers a hands-on learning experience about the history of text technologies. In the spirit of NC State’s commitment to Think and Do, students were challenged in their final projects to create prototype reading machines of their own using a process called critical making. This process encourages students to make strange and speculative things more as thought experiments than as working examples. An extra challenge for students in spring 2020 was, thanks to COVID-19, to be made without the Makerspace, with extremely limited materials and remote support from the Libraries and Makerspace staff. The exhibit features a selection of their projects and includes 14 reading machines.

“The critic I.A. Richards once said, ‘a book is a machine to think with.’ When you mess with that machine, what other kinds of thinking become possible and why? This assignment challenged students to imagine new, hybrid, speculative, and strange forms of reading machines. I’m always so impressed by how students blend their creative and critical thinking in these projects. And I’m even more impressed by the resiliency and resourcefulness that these students showed in making without a Makerspace.” —Paul Fyfe, Associate Professor of English, NC State University

Reading Machines features works by Victoria Augoustides, Elaine Gray Burgess, Allison Church, Corissa Cronkite, Brandon Daggerhart, Amaya Horner, Chase Jenquin, Anna Martin, Matthew Murdoch, Matthew Nordberg, Ria Shah, Thomas Steckmann, Ryan Wagoner, and Tori Whichard.