Illumination is an interactive art installation that uses light to discover and reveal poetry within printed texts. Visitors are welcome to put any printed text down onto the clipboard. A pair of switches built into the clipboard detects when a text is placed down. The text is then photographed by a camera suspended from above. This image is downloaded to a computer and sent to an OCR (optical character recognition) script, which scans the page to find all the words and their positions on the page. This process typically takes 1-2 minutes depending on the quality of the image, lighting, font face and size, etc.

The list of words found on the page is then sent to an artificial-intelligence algorithm that stores a statistical model of grammatical structures that has been derived from thousands of works of poetry and literature that it has read. This model is used to discover poetic structures within the new text that are statistically similar to what the program has been "inspired" by. As the poetry is being made, a projector that is suspended from above lights words on the page to reveal the poetry.









Jack Kalish is an interactive artist, designer, and programmer living in Brooklyn, NY.

Yonatan Ben-Simhon is a computational biologist, textual algorithms designer and mail artist from Tel Aviv & Brooklyn


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