In the early 1990s, when personal computing was young and artificial intelligence was not yet in the popular imagination, artist Janet Zweig created something extraordinary and prescient: sculptures that married early computers, simple algorithms, and dot-matrix printers with mechanical parts to auto-generate streams of poetic text that moved objects.
Essays by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Jena Osman, and Johanna Drucker reveal how Zweig’s witty contraptions were an early premonition of our current technological reality: an atmosphere of disinformation, fake news, and digital hallucinations. As Osman writes: “AI robs us of our imaginative faculty. Zweig’s sculptures, by contrast, gave us what we still very much need: opportunities for explorative play, the recognition of our own thought processes…and the potential to see the world as a site for creative collaboration.”
Richly illustrated, Recursive Apologies: Janet Zweig’s Text Generating Sculpture presents these works alongside the sources that inspired them. With a recursive design by Ben Denzer that mirrors the very concepts it explores, the book offers both a visual archive and a reflection on our ongoing relationship with thinking machines.
