In this column, artist, writer and educator Randy Lee Cutler disseminates a series of instructions for group exercises such as collective breathing, sound-making and gestural mimicry, framed within a question of how we might “think about bodies and time as core materials for generating trust and making form.”

This is a review of the 56th Venice Biennale showing from May 9 to November 22, 2015.

Sixteen writers each contribute to a collection of essays about an influential individual from the art world and culture at large.

The article discusses the relation between the corporeal and the cerebral, captured by words such as perambulation, peregrination, wayfaring, and peripatetic. The author discusses walking as a mobile form of thinking. The article discusses the link between walking and its expanded relationship to thinking within literature, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking,” among others. The author also discusses the relationship of walking to radical ways of being, including public demonstrations and social formations.

The article discusses the exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace, which was presented at the 55th Venice Biennale and curated by Director Massimiliano Gioni. The exhibition featured historical artifacts, found objects, and contemporary art, and included works by artists including Camille Henrot, Ed Atkins, Laurie Simmons and Allan McCollum, Hans Bellmer, Shinichi Sawada, and Danh Vo. The article also discusses the absence of Canadian artists in the curated components of the Biennale, as well as Shary Boyle’s work Music for Silence that was exhibited in the Canadian Pavilion.

The article discusses the science of reading in terms of psychological functioning and biological informational processing. The author details the etymology of the word reading including the Latin legere which also means to select and pick. Topics include the book A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel and the theories of Roland Barthes on the text and the reader.