Recognition derives from a scanned copy of the paperback edition of a book called Philosophy in a New Key (Langer, 1948) that I found online as a pdf. The anonymous creator of the pdf had used a optical character recognition (OCR) system to convert the scans into selectable text.

I noticed that some of the words and figures looked a bit strange, which made me curious. So I opened the pdf in a program called File Juicer, which is a tool for extracting all of a file’s embedded elements. It turns out that, in the places where the OCR could not decide what the letters were, it substituted a tiny image of that part of the document, inline with the text. So File Juicer had given me a directory of hundreds small images of text or other figures that the OCR system did not recognize and could not interpret as text.

I batch processed these image to make them all the same dimensions, which gave me a set of images that I could use as movie frames. I created this movie from those frames using an automated process.

I added a soundtrack that I made in Supercollider. It goes like this:

    {[
        SinOsc.ar([219,243],0,1,0) + LFPulse.ar([133,155],0,0,1,0),
        SinOsc.ar([239,245],0,1,0) + LFPulse.ar([117,141],0,0,1,0)
    ]}.play;

I never got around to reading the book.