‘The space between the writing/reading body and the text’ (2021)

How would we describe the space between the writing/reading body and the text? How does this space effect (bring about) meaning, in excess of the word's semantics? 

Lines, dots, and spaces. The basic building blocks of our words. Presence and absence in constant dialogue. The ink and the page, the black pixel and the white pixel, noise and silence. Space can convey a multitude of meanings; nothing can mean everything if done correctly. (Stuart) 

Text, air, pressure, softness, materiality and ideas that comes to a page, we pull thoughts as strings and threads that compose ideas. We weave, unweave, reweave them. If you think and observe closely, pen, keyboard, mind, fingers, and the intermingle bodies inside and out of the page start to dance. (Victoria)

Reading -a really committed reading- for me involves some form of rewriting, and often it seems that that my attempts at rewriting organise themselves through a quote or a rephrasing of a quote in and around my own words. Sometimes I think this particular approach is about trying to do the closest reading possible or about linking up with a thought or bringing several moments of thought together. Other times it looks like a compulsive collector-urge or a weird ventriloquism. (Ghada) 

My writing/reading body has become more noticeable, less illusive in the digital-Hundreds era. Looking from the page, the document, the text box and back to the meeting I see my furrowed brow reflected on the screen, in the pregnant pause before chatting I hear my chair squeak, chatting from other meeting calls going on in the house and at my wrist I feel my watch buzz. My watch, which tracks my steps, breath, heart rate, delivers my messages and plays music on my intermittent runs also delivers advice. It buzzes politely, yet firmly periodically as if to say, ‘sitting for 45 minutes? no way!’. Later, in one session as the conversation picks up the watch decides things are too intense, encouraging me to try a breathing exercise. My reading/writing body becomes apparent in the meeting between an over-eager fitness watch and The Hundreds where it has decided that the space of reading, writing and talking - in short  getting giddy over words - might be ill-advised. (Laura) 

Sitting with these two positions on a daily basis enables a specificity to arise in excess of the word’s semantics, that is contingent on the where, how and why of thought. This new meaning might arise in discussion with others, in movement through space, in patterns of behavior, in mood, in locality. It is often collectively made and can be evidenced through an embodied approach to writing that registers its effect on the form of the word, its graphic inscription. (Ben) 

Fingers on warm plastic, comfy then cramp from being folded up, tense and hyperaware or lost and flowing, black on white ordered and excessive, every letter singular contained and crowded with connotations, memories flashes as they are corralled into something struggling to become meaning, heart rates rise and fall with the half picture of what it might become, stomachs rumble and thoughts drift towards the kitchen or kettle. The long black line blinks. (Helen)