The situational library.

This paper introduces the ongoing series of itinerant participatory artworks called the Situational Library. Through the construction of a publicly accessible and open-source archive of physical and digital books, the Situational Library attempts to create a heightened sense of the exchange of something other, or external, which accompanies the exchange of the book itself

What remains is the book: The idea of the book in and around electronic space

The purpose of this study is to question the idea of the book in general and how this idea is transforming in electronic space, understood as a space of flows as distinct to a space of places (Castells, 1989, p. 349). In order to question the idea of the book in electronic space we must begin at its ending, or more specifically, at a point in the histories of the book that is widely understood as representing a closing of a parenthesis - that began with the invention of the printing press, up to the end of print—spanning some 500 years, beginning half way through the 15th century in Western Europe

The Trumpet of the Swan

This paper will outline the ideation, background and development of the electronic artwork The Trumpet of the Swan (Donnachie & Simionato, 2017) presented by the authors at the Electronic Literature Organisation conference in Porto, Portugal in 2017. The artwork is a custom-coded drawing-robot which automatically inscribes in natural media, every post published from the personal Twitter profile of the 45th President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, identified on Twitter as @realDonaldTrump. The machine, which has the appearance reminiscent of a swan, including a broad “body” balanced on two short legs that end in webbed “feet”, is a semi-autonomous robot that writes in a pen, crowned by a long white plume, on a continuous scroll of paper while producing bird-like sounds. The drawing-robot remains permanently in a state of attention and the demonstrated sequence of actions can only be triggered remotely and by the 45th President of the U.S.A. himself (or more precisely, by whomever publishes a new tweet through his Twitter account ‘@realDonaldTrump’). In other words, to borrow a popular phrase taken from twentieth century cold-war propaganda: only the President has the ability to “launch” this artwork which otherwise remains dormant, in waiting

Mallarmé's Self-replicating Machine: A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance

This paper explores the artistic legacy of Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolirà le Hasard” through a selection of derivative works, in order to demonstrate how the poem can be interpreted in digital environments as a self-replicating machine, programmatically facilitating the ongoing production of potentially countless ulterior works, including our own internet recasting called www.athrowofthedicewillneverabolishchance.com. Through a detailed discussion of this work, we will attempt to draw a lineage between Mallarmé’s original poem/book of 1897 and Google, incorporated a century later, in 1997. In conclusion, we will speculate on the potential that our interpretation of Mallarmé’s work may provide a form of poetry for non-human readers, which we interpret as a metaphysical search for meaning by the kinds of Artificial Intelligence programs currently in development by corporations such as Google