Reading, writing, resisting: literary appropriation in the readers project.

Abstract

The Readers Project is an aesthetically-oriented system of software entities designed to explore the culture of human reading. These entities, or 'readers', enact specific reading strategies and function as autonomous text generators, networked writing machines visible beyond the texts they 'read'. As the structures on which they operate are culturally implicated, the project's readers shed light on a range of institutional practices surrounding the digital literary and the aggregation of the linguistic commons by corporate interests. In this paper, we present the practical and theoretical considerations guiding the project's development, and consider various strategies to resist the commodification and enclosure of literary culture within the corporate 'cloud'.