The hatural resohaht freodeheles: "I am sitting in a room" + OCR

April 15 2011, 9:00 AM  by aparrish

For today's poem, I took the text of Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, wrote it into an image file (using, once again, processing.py), and then ran tesseract-ocr on the image. I then took the text output from tesseract-ocr, and wrote that into an image file, which I then sent back into tesseract-ocr. I repeated that process ten times, feeding the output of each iteration of the OCR output into the next. Just as Lucier's reading eventually took on the acoustic properties of the room he was in, the text in this experiment gradually comes to reflect the properties and flaws of the OCR software. The gallery below shows the results.

 

Audio output from OSX's "say" command for the original text:

original.aiff Listen to this

 

OSX's "say" command reads the text after ten iterations:

final.aiff Listen to this

 

Tags

alvinlucier, ocr, poemaday, poetry, recursion, rooms, sitting

1407 views and 2 responses

  • May 7 2011, 10:43 AM
    Tiger Fox liked this post.
  • May 7 2011, 10:55 AM
    Tiger Fox responded:
    I'm familiar with the original Lucier piece. This is quite funny and interesting because the original became more about the three-dimensional acoustic properties of the room he recorded in (mainly resonance) and the space in which the creation of the document happened. Similarly in this work, you may be illuminating the n-dimensional properties of the shape recognition software "space" with the additional jump of appropriating source material from an artist working in another medium. Muy meta. Really enjoyed all your textperiments! Thanks for posting.