The wandering i is an interactive audio-visual experience, which uses eye-tracking software and a responsive soundscape to show your unique reading of Ulysses.
Reading is something most of us take for granted, but it is an incredibly complex skill. Far from being a plodding business of looking at one word and then the next – reading is a dance of difficulty, interest and delight.
Our eyes skip across the sentences, while our brains fill in the blanks.
And Ulysses is full of blanks: it is full of things we don’t entirely understand. More than any other book, Ulysses happens in the reader’s head. Joyce demands that we figure the meaning out for ourselves, and this makes it a profoundly democratic work. Each unique reading makes Ulysses bigger, by the choices we make and the meanings we take, as our eyes move across the page.
Pictured above is a gaze map, which represents one of our unique readings of Ulysses.