The publication is a poetic contemplation on the first encounter between reader’s gaze and written text, consisting of short sentences and images derived from traced eye gaze of reader’s eyes. A companion to the installation Reading Voice (2019) which is part of the artistic research project Reading Reading (2017-). The research project is a manifestation of the various ways to capture, embody and unsettle the temporal relations that unfold between the written text, eye movement, and the (inner) voice while reading.

This is about how the reader moves through the written text as the text moves through them, capturing and stretching the temporality just before the text is activated into meaning, and before the reader’s subjectivity is shaped by the encounter with the text. The time before the view, the time before making sense, the time before speech-voice.