Exhbition: Tokyo TDC Prizewinners Exhibition

Year: 2020

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Tokyo TDC Prizewinners Exhibition


The Library of Nonhuman Books was awarded the RGB prize from The Tokyo Type Directors Club in 2020. The competition, regarded as one of the most prestigious in its field receives over 3500 entries each year and awards 10 prizes.

Artists' Statement published by TDC:

These books were not designed by humans. They were autonomously generated by our custom-coded reading-machine using Artificial Intelligence.

Our reading-machine begins by using Computer Vision and Optical Character Recognition to identify the text on any open book placed under it’s dual-cameras, before leveraging Machine Learning and

Natural Language Processing to select a short poetic combination of words on the page which it saves, while digitally erasing all other words. The reading-machine then searches for an illustration from the Google Image Archive to ‘illuminate’ the page based on the meanings of the remaining words.

Once every page in the book has been read, interpreted, and illuminated, the system automatically publishes the results using an Internet printing service, and the resulting volume is finally added to the Library of Nonhuman Books. From the moment our machine begins ‘reading’, until the delivery of the book from the print-on-demand service, our automated-art-system proceeds without the intervention of humans.

The machine can produce a multitude of unique ‘illuminated scripts’ from any physical book, each one revealing new meanings that were always there in the original, but have remained hidden until that moment.

In a time where books are being transformed into clouds of words, this project helps them find new bodies that lie somewhere between the human and machine worlds. A publishing experiment for our post-literate society, which increasingly defers its reading to nonhuman counterparts.

We are honoured to receive the Tokyo Type Directors Club Award for the Library of Nonhuman Books. It is a unique opportunity to share our work with our peers in an international context, with the hope we can continue re-imaging the futures of the book together.


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The Library of Nonhuman Books Prizewinner Tokyo TDC

The Library of Nonhuman Books Prizewinner Tokyo TDC 2020

) The Center for Computational Unknowing
Legal notice

At the CCU we practice many experimental art techniques of appropriation, including computational collage where existing publications (including books and magazines) and other found printed matter, are 'cut-up' and recombined into new works. The use of these found materials means that parts of the original publications may be included in the final artworks and/or process documentation. In such cases, we acknowledge the use of the original somewhere in the didactic description or directly within the work itself. However, any inclusion of the found publication, or part thereof, in the final artwork should not imply any endoresment of the CCU by the original publication's authors or publishers. All enquiries should be directed to our offices.


 
Acknowledgements

All artworks and texts, unless otherwise stated, are published courtesy the artists, 'Donnachie, Simionato & Sons' (2024). Visual and textual materials on this site may only be reproduced for scholarly purposes and with citations. Please forward all enquiries to email@unknowing.cc

Many of the automated-art-systems in the CCU utilise open-source software and hardware which would not exist without the contribution of their respective communities. Special thanks to Processing (Java and Javascript); arduino (C++) and Raspberry Pi systems; Python; Inkscape.



Atomic Activity Books

Official publishing partners to the CCU. At www.AtomicActivity.com you can find limited editions from the Library of Nonhuman Books, as well as art multiples from many of the CCU's other automated-art-systems. Explore the entire catalogue of books and objects at the Atomic Activity website, or from selected bookstores.



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