@ -30,20 +30,23 @@ Magic words operate as prompts, inviting other readers to interact with the text
Magic words emerged from a curiosity to see what kind of social incantations can be evoked through making custom prompts for each other, and how such prompts affect a moment of being together with text. As such, they become a tool to describe relations between text & reader, reader & reader, place & text, place & text & reader. While going over the `__MAGICWORDS__` in the session we had together with Ania and Andrea, we were surprised how they also become an annotation system in which the intention of the comment is formulated by the name of the tag; this changed the relation of the comment with the text by inviting participants to imagine all sorts of different ways to speak back to that what is written.
`__MAGICWORDS__` have started being used in this way by amy pickles and Cristina Cochior during a Read & Repair session on Digital Solidarity Networks (2020), and have been re-used in multiple other sessions since.
### `x-dexing`
`x-dexing` is a cross-reading practice that through chance operations guides the reader in going over a body of texts. Contrary to an index, the `x-dex` invites to perform a non-linear distribution of attention across textures, semantics and aesthetics of the texts at hand.
While `x-dexing`, we read a collection of texts (materials) from a particular perspective (handles) across forms (text, color, curves, absences). To start with `x-dexing`, you are prompted to choose one *piece of material*, *handle* and *form*. In the next step, you are invited to write a *score*: a short set of rules for a particular way of reading. As a last step, you execute your own score, visualing the ruleset in a *trace*. `X-dexing` can happen in a concentrated manner, engaging with materials, given scores or invented ones, using these forms or others. But it can also be operated slowly, along time, in an ongoing way.
If “indexing” would be about gaining access through the illusion of completeness, the `x-dex` is about situated unfoldings, about letting go of fixitude and about handing over for a little longer; a form of generative relationality that is not providing with control nor indication, but a sort of playfulness and imaginative re-entanglement. Perspectives, feelings, aesthetics or uneasiness are not only brought to the table by the agents that share materials, but by the emergent `x-dexer` as well. Together they contribute to an explicit toolset for handling difference patterns, operate with worldly absences, and score open questions.
`x-dexing` was made by Jara Rocha and Manetta Berends to navigate and cross the book Iterations (2020), and appeared in a couple of other workshops and different versions since.
