First established in 2011 by Fiona Connor and Michala Paludan, Newspaper Reading Club is an ongoing project that takes many forms including; performances, radio broadcasts, publications and posters. Central to the project is an investigation of how people retrieve their news and how they engage with larger narratives of current affairs.
In this instance, 10 posters will be pasted based on readings that will take place throughout New York City and the five boroughs, in public and semi-public spaces between October 2 and October 15, 2014. Recordings of these readings are transcribed, and pasted back as posters up in the same spot as the reading was conducted. The posters are site-specific, localized mediations of domestic and international news by individual readers. Their insertion and display in public spaces marks their return to the built environments in which their language and content was generated.
Connor and Paludan ask participants to read from newspapers and periodicals of their choice, as they normally would, but to verbalize the process of skimming, commenting and personal editorializing that naturally occurs. A recording is made of the participants as they read through articles and make accompanying comments. These recordings are later transcribed to produce texts which become personalized documents of wider political trends, and which make visible the structures by which information is transmitted and absorbed. Through this process each edition of the Newspaper Reading Club comes to speak to the location in which it is held and the particular events present on the day of the reading.
New York City, NY; NYC