Technics of the Page / The Last Human Reader interrogates reading, memory and authorship through artists’ books as we enter an age where machines are intervening in these processes
A book has spent centuries being regarded as a vessel for information. At Wits Art Museum, a new exhibition is asking us to reimagine it as technology in its own right.
Technics of the Page / The Last Human Reader opens on 8 October at the Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts, introducing artist’s books to the conversation around artificial intelligence. It seeks to interrogate what it means to read when machines are increasingly involved in producing, classifying and recalling information.
The book is already a machine
The exhibition’s premise starts with something easy to overlook. A book has a mechanism. It has pages that can be turned and folded, cut and rotated, and arranged. It has a sequence, it hides parts of itself and determines how a reader moves through it. An artist’s book can push these functions further still, taking the physical structure of the book as part of the artwork itself.
The Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts, housed within Wits Art Museum, is particularly suited to this conversation. Established at Wits following Jack Ginsberg’s donation of his collection in 2019, the Centre now houses more than 15,000 books, including more than 5,000 artists’ books.
The collection seeks to treat the book as an artistic medium rather than simply a vessel for text. Technics of the Page builds on this premise, placing its books alongside artificial intelligence as a precursor, companion, irritant and saboteur, interrogating how different kinds of machines store, process and produce knowledge.
What happens when reading becomes machinic?
The title The Last Human Reader is deliberately dramatic. The exhibition makes it clear that it is not a prediction. Instead, it asks what counts as reading when the reader might be human, collective, machinic, ancestral, distributed or imagined.
This question becomes increasingly relevant as books and archives are digitised and converted into data. Once a text can be broken into searchable information, its metadata and patterns for machines to process, what happens to everything that depends on a physical encounter?
A fold can change the way a page is read. A binding can determine how a book opens. A missing section can become part of its meaning. An instruction might require the reader to perform an action before the work can be understood.
These are forms of information that do not necessarily behave neatly as data.
The exhibition is therefore interested in what remains difficult to capture: the material, the embodied, the illegible and the things that resist straightforward categorisation.
AI becomes a question of authorship
Artificial intelligence enters the exhibition less as a subject to be illustrated. Its presence raises familiar questions around authorship, but also memory, classification and prediction. If a machine can generate, reorganise or interpret information, where does authorship sit?
What happens when reading becomes an interaction between human intention and machine processing, and what kinds of knowledge become visible or invisible through these systems?
For artists working with books, these questions have a physical dimension.
The artist’s book can make the mechanics of reading visible. It can force a reader to slow down, make a decision, manipulate an object or encounter information in an order that cannot simply be dictated by a search bar.
This makes the exhibition relevant not only within the relatively specialised world of book arts, but a conversation about how we encounter information at a moment where much of that encounter is increasingly mediated by interfaces and automated systems.
The page as a site of resistance
Technics of the Page does not romanticise the analogue book as a pure alternative to technology. Its more interesting proposition is that the book has always been technological. What it allows us to do is determined by its particular technology. A physical book can make reading tactile, spatial and sometimes unpredictable.
An artist’s book can take these qualities and make them the substance of the work itself. By putting these objects into conversation with AI, the exhibition creates a space to consider what might be lost when reading becomes increasingly abstracted from physical experience, and what new forms of reading might emerge in its place.
Curated by Ciara Struwig, Renzo Filinich and Stacy Hardy, with Sam Kentridge, Twiggy Matiwana, Gabrielle Mudiwa, Sahar Carter and Vuyokazi Ngemntu, the exhibition opens at the Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts at Wits Art Museum on 8 October. It will run through February 2027, with a curator-led walkabout scheduled for 17 October at 12:00.
The exhibition’s title leaves us with a deliberately uncomfortable possibility. Perhaps the interesting question is not whether humans will become the last readers, but what kind of readers we become once machines are reading alongside us.
