Rocinante's Windmill is a digital wayside that promotes voice reading: which is something like reading out loud as a group while using a prepared text that can be read more easily and effectively. It is my—I am Grisostomo, the sitemaster here—belief that all the recording arts (social media, chat rooms, books, instagramming, audio recordings, movies, videos, etc.) have displaced (without actually duplicating) the experience of reading out load and of most other types of conversational, live, social, and local entertainment. Displaced, I say, because reading out loud and live entertainment (apart from gaming) has all but vanished from our lives; but not duplicated, because the transition to private recordings being privately experienced has left a psychological gap within us.
The gap may be called "shared experience" or, perhaps better said, simply "conversation"; because reading silently, texting alone, and passively listening, liking, and viewing—even if done in a crowd of other readers, texters, listeners, likers, and viewers—is not the same as being together and accounted for through interaction, interjection, comment, revision, interruption, and even disruption that does not lead to the participants simply "switching channels." Records and recordings invite personal reflection but not group experience or any of the consequent conversational, social, and even political repercussions.
Rocinante's Windmill promotes something that has until recently been effectively impossible: groups of people reading a single text responsively and out loud, or voice reading. This requires a practical and artistic innovation—the practice of reading is changed and, over time, the art and craft of writing will be, too—and like any innovation of this kind, there is a technical or technological achievement that backs it.
Voice reading is reading aloud from texts that have been first edited and then printed to facilitate reading in just as many voices as there are readers present. The texts—originally written with no more than one reader in mind—are edited to suit the wanted number of readers while allowing the number to change at any time without disrupting the entire affair. This is achieved by the simplest of means: color coding the text so that a specific color represents each reading voice. The readers thus know their lines whether or not they have read the text before. Even if voice readers come and go and their number changes, all present may simply switch to another edition and carry on. If you are confident about reading out loud you are a competent voice reader, although there are greater accomplishments ahead as you grow comfortable with acting your part a little while you read.
The backing technology is a purposefully and digitally edited, color coded, and printed text that can be displayed on any number of digital devices at the click of a button. Voice reading is not, then, a retreat from the digital age; it is a socially benevolent use of digital technology that connects digitalization to earlier forms of conversational entertainment like storytelling, play acting, acting, and role playing.
Rocinante's Windmill intends to host texts that have been edited and made ready for free download by voice readers anywhere.
You may imagine a time when people will enter a bar and hear voices, not recordings. And even if people must at first fill a silence, won't that be a better time than our own?