The reader's gymnasium

Redundancy as key concept in cognitive information design. The script act is ramified in several levels of iconic and diagrammatic cross-mapping, so that rhythms are repeated from the phonemic, prosodic, bibliographic, graphetic, acoustic, mimetic, rhetorical, kinetic, physiognomic, gestural, proxemics, etc. dimensions. In a concert, the whole act is massively reproduced not just by the dancing clapping singing crowd but by the media technology which multiplies its replication a millionfold. Here, salience becomes the basis of real experience, that of an aesthetic waveform getting reproduced and translated by various modalities. Thus, a script act is always a concert where analogues are replicated on various media so that it can become saliently readable.

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Where is the Reader, how is it inscribed? Usually hidden, as ground, not figure, but sometimes foregrounded, thematized. Like the fourth wall. In the visual arts, the perspective, play of depth, light, volume, angle, ways by which the readerly gaze is embedded as a mode of looking. Until there is no more form or depth, and the vision stops short before the materiality of its medium. The focus is on the body, texture, surface, material of the frontal object of attention. Sometimes, in action painting for example, the reader's space expands (expressionism) to become the whole record of its nonlinear motions.

Artefacts of looking may or may not accommodate the space for the reader/observer; they may, partly or fully, demand or deny the observer's space. Not often is this aspect thematized, or this tendency follows historical modulations. Or, the ontology of the object is actually that of the readerly ''gymnasium,'' displaced to satisfy the age's rhetoric of discursive authority (positivism). In literature as early as the epics, the narrator function being given to the figure who takes over the narrative is a reader in disguise, where performance intersects and becomes part of the ontological space of fiction (metalepsis).