The Library of Nonhuman Books

BACKGROUND: This research explores the potential for automated art and design practices made possible by the emerging technologies of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to generate books. This research speculates on the book to come in what has been described as a post-literate society (Blanchot) — a society in which humans are increasingly deferring reading to their nonhuman counterparts (McLuhan). CONTRIBUTION: The Library of Nonhuman Books was an installation with a custom-built reading machine and the printed books it produced. At the heart of the project is a custom-built reading-machine (engineered by Simionato; coded by Donnachie) which uses Computer Vision and Optical Character Recognition to identify the text on any open book placed under its dual-cameras, before leveraging Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to discover new meanings using the existing words on the page and combining these with images from the Google Image Archive, to 'illuminate' the work. The automated-art-system can read, interpret, illuminate, and publish a book without human intervention. SIGNIFICANCE: The Library of Nonhuman Books was exhibited at the peer-reviewed conference xCoAx 2019 (7th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X) in Milan; won the 2020 Tokyo Type Directors Club Award, (one of 10 prizes awarded from almost 3000 entries), described by Henrik Kubel, president of AGI (UK) as “the single most important annual typographic competition in the world”; selected as one of 30 works in the peer-reviewed exhibition Computer Vision Art Gallery as part of the ICCV 2019, Seoul, Korea; shown at the NeurIPS AI Art Workshop in Vancouver, Canada; long-listed for the International Lumen Prize; won the 2020 Robert Coover Award for Electronic Literature, an annual monetary prize bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organisation. The project received media reviews in The Conversation, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, ABC Radio National and TripleR.