Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path

Every reading is, strictly speaking, unrepeatable; something in it, of it, will vary. Recollections of reading accumulate in relation to this iterable specificity; each takes its predecessors as its foundation, each inflects them with its backward-looking futurity. In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of readings backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field. In original analyses of Vannevar Bushs Memex and Ted Nelsons Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading. In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surfacethe real limit of the machines operations and of the readers memorieson which text and image are projected in the late age of print.