The presentation will from a cultural geographical as well as phenomenologically based perspective of rhythm investigate how practices of reading are changing due to digitization. With new media follow new habits and possibilities for reading. The paper will, with a point of departure in the increasing use of audiobooks during the pandemic in Denmark, propose this change of reading rhythms as part of a cultural transformation. Reading has, historically, primarily during the last 200 years, been related to isolated, aesthetic contemplation. However reading is also, as Siri Hustvedt frames it “a bodily feeling of rhythms, sounds, and meaning within a human that lives in, and is part of a culture”(2022). The paper wishes to investigate digital reading practices in dialogue with this bodily taking part in a culture. By bringing reading in to dialogue with aspects of rhythms, the paper will form an interdisciplinary relational concept of rhythm that from both a sociological, an affective, and aesthetic perspective investigates how rhythms of reading are performed and experienced in the digital reading condition.

Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Culture at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. Her research interests fall within the fields of sound, literature, digital culture, reading, music, medialization, and phenomenological aspects of aesthetic experience. Furthermore, she focuses on the unique epistemological potential of sound with respect to how we sense and experience the world, and she has researched how sound is constituted and changed by the cultural discourses in which it is active. Together with Iben Have, she founded and edits the international, online journal SoundEffects. 2019-2022 she has been working on the project “Reading Between Media – Developing and Encouraging Children’s Multisensorial Reading in a Digital Age”, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The manuscript of the project's forthcoming book, The Digital Reading Condition, is published with Routledge 2022.
 

• Aesthetic seminar Poster
• Aesthetic seminar Programme

Aesthetic seminar is organized by Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen and Morten Kyndrup on behalf of School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University.