Abstract
A poetic hack of Google's (now defunct) reCAPTCHA internet security system.
A throw of the dice will never abolish chance .com is a net-artwork comprising a live-data driven reinterpretation of the poetry of the French symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé. Occassionally, the results of the digital artwork are printed into loose, unbound sheets (see image below). (1)
Inspired by Mallarmé’s often-cited phrase: “The world exists to end up in a book”, this net-artwork is a dynamic remapping of Mallarmé’s notoriously cryptic poem “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard” through the appropriation of Google’s software encryption service ‘CAPTCHA’ (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) —which, according to Google’s rhetoric, contributes to the company’s digitisation of every unique book ever published. (2)
The algorithm that drives the artwork, developed by Karen ann Donnachie, leverages the ground-breaking spatial organisation of Mallarmé’s poem and combines this with dynamic data collected from Google's mass-collaborative platform reCAPTCHA, creating an ever-expanding and transforming re-edition of the poem. This work premiered internationally in the Hybridity and Synaesthesia exhibition at Lydgalleriet/Østre, as part of the Electronic Literature Organization Festival in Bergen, Norway in 2015.
1 The authors wish to thank the staff of the the national library of France (BnF), François-Mitterrand site, for allowing access to Stephan Mallarmé's hand-annotated printer's sheets for the original edition of "Un Coup De Des...", which are held in the rare-books archive. A digital copy of the first edition can be found at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k71351c
2 The authors acknowledge Google's generosity in not shutting down this artwork when it first launched, and they realised it was an experimental poem and not the DDOS attack it seemed. Since then Google's mass-collaboration platform, reCAPTCHA has closed. The original net-artwork has been archived at the original link, even if it no longer makes real-time calls to the Google platform. Read more about reCAPTCHA.
