These books were not designed by humans.

These books were autonomously generated by Artificial Intelligence for the Library of Nonhuman Books using a custom-coded reading-machine created by Karen ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato.

The reading-machine uses 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 erasing all other words. Finally, the reading-machine automatically searches for an illustration from the Google Image Archive to ‘illuminate’ the page according to 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 then added to the Library of Nonhuman Books. From the moment our machine completes its reading, until the delivery of the book from the print-on-demand service, our automated-art-system proceeds without the intervention of humans.

Each reading of any physical book by the machine, can produce a multitude of ‘illuminated scripts’, every 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 between the human and nonhuman worlds. A publishing experiment for our post-literate society, which increasingly defers its reading to nonhuman counterparts.