sculpture made of a steel chair frame with stolen library wheels in the air detail of trolley wheel with human hair and filth two chair frame sculpures with wheels on a square of carpet tiles detail of one of the frames with chewing gum stuck to it A4 poster stuck up in a window four posters fanned out on a wooden desk the poster has small black text with a big heading eading Swivel-knot and red illustrations of trolley wheels with wood grain centres

Subtitles / Domtitles: the Erotics of Time-based Reading in Video

Writing on screen is a daddy; the reader of time-based media (that’s you!) is a brat.

video essay for conference

In Masturbatory Reader, D Mortimer (2023) writes about the masochism of reading: reading, reduced to its naked technics is following words across a page and seeing where they will take us. What are the technics of following words across a screen–phone, laptop, TV.

What happens to the temporality of reading–skimming, skipping, not-reading–with captioning in streaming media, text in films, subtitles on instagram reels and in video games? Look away and you miss a beat. How does writing as a synchronous technology conduct the body? Is this new form of reading inherently queer? Does screen-reading have the capacity to trouble hierarchies in audio-visual cultures, reprioritising the dart of the eye across text rather than the sight-centricity of an image? What agency does the masturbatory reader have if they potentially have both hands free?

This essay takes the form of an almost silent text-based video to be read privately in public. Those assembled in the conference room become disobedient bratty readers resisting the power dynamics of moving-image-text attempting to regulate bodies and behaviour. The medium is an encrypted message, in the citational sphere of artists and writers: D Mortimer, Christine Sun Kim, Liza Sylvestre, Carolyn Lazard, Sarah Hayden, Derek Jarman and (still unread) Roland Barthes.

Domtitles was presented at Sticky Fingers Publishing’s stream on Masturbatory Reading: the Erotics of Knowledge Production, at the London Conference of Critical Thought, 20-21 June 2025, Birkbeck, University of London.