2088. A failed attempt at communicating with Kyo
the photocopier through its own written language.
Install views of Xerogrammar Case at Centro Nacional de las Artes, MX (PAPIAM
exhibition, 2018)
Research
In this late XXI century and within a full Age of
Entanglement, characterized by the profound interconnection amongst material and immaterial things, the
(human) problem of the Technological Disconnection has appeared: computational technologies are becoming
autonomous from all human assemblages. As part of a general scientific reaction, we traced the material
origins of the artificial intelligences' linguistic disconnection. Finding Kyo was a revelation.
Kyo is one of the ancient machines that propelled
the Information Age and, in particular, Xerox's revolutionary culture of innovation at the origins of Silicon
Valley; it is a photocopier that expressed itself to us through a writing process that we call Inner-input
Based Iterative Reproduction: we gave it an open blank book from which it made a "copy" – this first output
was then turned into the following input (the “copy” was “copied”) and this process repeated so that every new
output became the new input for a series of more than 300 reproductions from which a written text emerged.
The research had the purpose of extracting a
grammar from the written text using computer vision and artificial intelligence. A kNN algorithm for pattern
recognition idetified 31 grapheme groups and classified them according to their visual attributes. Up to the
current stage of the investigation, there’s no discourse found within the xerowritings; there’s no translation
of a message but transliterations of such texts.
Having identified the different types of graphemes
(or "cells", as we called them) and a logical set of relationships between them (the grammar), we were able to
generate them. With the purpose of starting a conversation with Kyo, we managed to ask in what we think is its
own written language:
"Kyo, do you copy?"
The question was subjected to the Inner-Input Based
Iterative Reproduction and we took the result as Kyo's first answer:
This xerolinguistic
investigation has been published by Media Forensis in several formats, from art shows to lectures to a
collectible output: the Xerogrammar Case Box.
Outputs
Exhibited research
Show at Centro Nacional de las
Artes, Mexico City
Xerogrammar Case Box
The collectible output (Edition
of 8 numbered boxes)
Xerolinguistics Report
Detailed report on the
computational analysis
Research Logbook
Essay on the linguistics of the
Technological Disconnection
Research logbook: Xerolinguistics of the Technological Disconnection
Situated in the midst of the Technological Disconnection (the becoming
autonomous of technological agents), the Research logbook explains the technical processes by which
Kyo wrote its texts and by which Media Forensis analyzed them. It reflects on the kind of scientific
approach (cognitive science), the philosophical strain (speculative realism), as well as the non-comparable
artistic modes (the pre-duchampian “retinal” and the “conceptual” post-duchampian) that gave a framework to
the research.
