Technics of the Page / The Last Human Reader
| When: | Thursday, 08 October 2026 - Thursday, 08 October 2026 |
| Where: | Wits Art Museum Braamfontein Campus East |
| Start time: | 18:00 |
| Enquiries: | For more information on the show please email Ciara.Struwig@wits.a.za |
| Cost: | Entrance free, all welcome |
You are invited to the opening of "Technics of the Page/ The Last Human Reader", and exhibition at the Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts at Wits Art Museum.
The exhibition will be opened by curator, author and researcher Stacy Hardy. Join us again on Saturday 17 October 2026 at 12:00 for a walkabout led by the curators.
The book is not the opposite of technology. The book is already a machine. A hinge machine. A memory machine. A sequencing machine. A concealment machine. An imagination engine. Rather than staging a familiar opposition between the analogue book and the digital interface, Technics of the Page/ The Last Human Reader places the artist's book beside articficial intelligence as predecessor, companion, irritant and saboteur.
The exhibition moves through technical beings, memory systems, generative machines, networks, hallucinations and that which refuses capture. It asks what happens when books and archives increasingly circulate as data, metadata, predictions and extractable patterns, and what remains stubbornly material, illegible, embodied or resistant. These books must still be turned, unfolded, rotated, decoded, listened to, peered into and sometimes performed. Meanwhile the resistance of a binding, an instruction, an ommission.
Artificial intelligence enters the exhibition as an unstable apparatus for thinking about memory, authorship, classification, prediction and reading. The title The Last Human Reader is not a prophecy. It is a provocation.
What counts as reading when the reader may be human, collective, machinic, ancestral, distributed or imagined?
Parking for the opening is available in the garage beneath the museum.
The exhibition is curated by Ciara Struwig, Renzo Filinich & Stacy Hardy with Sam Kentridge, Twiggy Matiwana, Gabrielle Mudiwa, Sahar Carter & Vuyokazi Ngemntu.
Exhibition dates 08 October 2026 - February 2027
JGCBA hours are Tuesday - Friday 10:00 - 16:00
Museum Hours are Tuesday - Saturday 10:00 - 16:00
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