Title Mallarmé's Self-replicating Machine

Year: 2016

Credit: Donnachie, Karen ann & Simionato, Andrea [Andy]

Abstract

Mallarmé's poem as a self-replicating machine. 

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Mallarmé's Self-replicating Machine


In this paper we begin to explore the seminal poem/book by the French symbolist poet Stephan Mallarmé. We consider the work as a self-replicating machine with the potential to reorganise its own meanings around central themes of the captain of a recently shipwrecked vessel in a storm. This paper contains some of the early thinking around our artwork www.athrowofthedicewillneverabolishchance.com, which generates new versions of Mallarmé's original poem, including its sparse distribution of words across the page spreads, using only images of machine-unreadable words taken from Google's reCaptcha service (now defunct).

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Acknowledgements

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