Page Not Found and the Reading Room are happy to present a two-part online reading session around ‘repair’, with the Rotterdam-based initiative Varia.

In this Reading Room session we will consider the modes in which our bodies interact with, are perceived by and operate through, with and against everyday communication technologies. This collective work will be carried out on an Etherpad, an open-source, web-based collaborative editor, allowing authors to simultaneously edit a text document and see all of the participants’ edits in real-time. What intimate relations are bound within our screens and machines? What does our body learn while flowing in these zones?

As a group we will look into practices of “annotating” text. We will make digital annotations as we read, digesting the words while we highlight, underline, write in the margin, look up meanings and take notes, making the text more accessible to the next person who encounters it.

The thoughts central to this reparative reading session are formed by scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In the essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You”, Sedgwick tells us that rearranging what we read can be a form of sustenance.

Varia (NL) is a Rotterdam based initiative focused on working with, on and through everyday technology. At its core the initiative aims to be a social infrastructure from which to collaboratively facilitate critical understandings on the technologies that surround us. The initiative is a membership-based organisation striving to become a space for questions, opinions, modifications, help and action.

This online session takes place in two parts: the first part from 14:30-16:30 and the second part from 17:00-19:00. Participants can choose to attend one or both parts of the session.

While a small introduction will be held over Zoom, the session itself does not take place through video-call but through the interactive Etherpad document.

Texts for this session will be provided in the moment and there is no need for reading in advance.

Please confirm your attendance for one or both parts of the session by sending an email to register@page-not-found.nl.