Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924–1992) was a Benedictine monk, theologian, and avant-garde poet, closely associated with the concrete and visual poetry movements of the 1960s–70s. Best known for his “typestracts”, Houédard used a manual typewriter to produce abstract, typographic compositions. By layering keystrokes, spacing, and symbols, he transformed writing into image, creating dense fields, rhythmic patterns, or airy constellations of marks. The typestracts often resist linear reading, existing instead as meditative visual scores. Houédard saw them as a form of contemplative practice, uniting spirituality, language, and material process, and they remain influential in artists’ books, visual poetry, and experimental typography.

Reflection: Dom's work is relevant to my research in regard to his use of the manual typewriter to create patterns and scores and its relation to rhythm.

A reading pacer machine is a mechanical or electronic device designed to guide the reader’s eye along lines of text at a controlled speed. Its purpose is usually to train reading fluency, concentration, or speed.

- Early versions (mid-20th century) were used in schools and speed-reading courses. They projected or displayed text with a moving window, bar, or light that “paced” the reader line by line.
-Some models gradually increased speed to push readers beyond subvocalization.
-Later electronic versions used scrolling screens or tachistoscopic flashes of words. They sit at the intersection of educational technology and experimental reading machines, often appearing in discussions of alternative reading practices alongside artists’ book experiments.

Reflection:  Possible further exploration needed of the mechanisms used in this reading machine particularly the scroll function. This forms a link between early and contemporary mechanised reading machines.

Everyday Science and Mechanics from April 1935, brought an interesting idea of the book of the future, as seen at that time. The prediction was that books and newspapers would be stored and read on microfilm. The stand was therefore designed to hold a screen which displayed photographs of book pages. The description of the machine said (via Smithsonian): It has proved possible to photograph books, and throw them on a screen for examination, as illustrated long ago in this magazine. At the left is a device for applying this for home use and instruction; it is practically automatic. The display was mounted on a large adjustable pole. The stand included also a book lamp, and a special control panel to turn pages and adjust focus. In the 1930s many people believed microfilm would be the future of publishing. The same year the New York Times started copying all of its editions onto microfilm.

https://ebookfriendly.com/book-machines-before-kindle/​

Reflection: This reader relates to Microfiche and Micro Pages project by Abigail Thomas. My publication Emitron was scanned in and converted to the microfiche format. Read more here

Deirdre Loughridge is a musicologist who specializes in musical cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in histories of music technology. Her first book, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2016) won the Kenshur Prize for outstanding book in eighteenth-century studies. Her current research explores how music has been used to define the nature of, and relationships between humans and machines from the eighteenth century to today.

In 1930, an American avant-garde writer Bob Brown published a manifesto, entitled “The Readies,” where he called for a new reading machine that would allow him to continue reading quicker and more conveniently. A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around and attach to any old electric light plug and read a hundred thousand word novels in ten minutes if I want to, and I want to. A machine as handy as a portable phonograph, typewriter or radio, compact, minute operated by electricity, the printing done microscopically by the new photographic process on a transparent tough tissue roll. The machine answering Brown’s manifesto was constructed a few months later by Ross Saunders and Hilaire Hiler. It was revealed in May 1931 at the meeting of surrealist artists in Cagnes-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera.

The artists believed “the machine would be a part of a revolutionary transition to a liberated wor(l)d” (a quote from The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown by Craig Saper). The device was constructed from a breadbox, and included a system of wires and spools to present special texts written and processed for it, called “readies.

Bookwheel, from Agostino Ramelli's Le diverse et artificiose machine, 1588

A bookwheel is a rotating reading device, first designed in the 16th century by Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli. It resembles a vertical Ferris wheel of lecterns or shelves, allowing multiple large books to be mounted at once. By turning a geared wheel, a reader could rotate between texts without lifting or repositioning heavy volumes. This mechanical aid anticipated modern notions of information management, enabling cross-referencing and comparative study with ease. Beyond practicality, the bookwheel symbolized Renaissance ideals of engineering, knowledge, and invention. Today, it is often revisited by artists and historians as a metaphor for multitasking and reading technologies.

The Drawing Machine by Eske Rex, an artist based in Copenhagen, Denmark, provides one way to create art without actually creating it. Now that's a riddle. Essentially, he has built a big device reminiscent of something that would be used during a war in the middle ages. Outfitted with two pendulums, they move in a very precise manner to create large-scale artworks in colorful inks.

https://www.eskerex.com/​

Echo Yang is a graphic designer / art director based in Taiwan. She is fascinated by exploring the joy of graphic representation and printing experiments in both commercial and self-initiated field. As part of her MA work at the Design Academy Eindhoven, artist and graphic designer Echo Yang created a fascinating series entitled Autonomous Machines that transforms analog devices into autonomous drawing machines. The objects, ranging from a tin chicken toy to a windup alarm clock to an old Walkman, are all obsolete now in the age of ever-advancing technology and digitalization, but Yang breathes new life into them by using them to create self-generated art.
​
Through this project, Yang explores the notions of information design and modern generative design processes, in which designers use algorithms to create a variety of different outcomes. She applies these modern generative design processes to old-school, analog devices in order to reveal their internal algorithms. “By making use of the specific mechanical movement of a particular machine, I attempt to transform them into a drawing machines in the simplest way,” the artist explains. A tin toy with a paint-covered cotton swab taped to it dabs paint in repeating circles. A hand mixer with paintbrush bristles attached to it creates abstract swirls of paint and ink. Each machine, once wound up or turned on, is left to its own devices to create repetitive, but complex, works of art.

A collaborative marking making excercise run with Level 4 illustration students using card, string wire to create devices that adds distance between pen and hand. 

Zsanett Szirmay is a Hungarian artist and designer whose project Soundweaving translates traditional embroidery patterns into music. Using cross-stitch motifs from Hungarian and matyó folk textiles, she encodes designs onto punched paper rolls, which are then played on a mechanical music box. This process transforms visual heritage into sound, creating an interplay between craft, technology, and sensory experience. By reinterpreting textile ornamentation as musical notation, Szirmay highlights cultural memory while bridging past and present. Her work celebrates the tactile and auditory, showing how traditional crafts can evolve into innovative, cross-disciplinary forms of contemporary art and design.

The machine itself is difficult to describe. “It works the way a printer does,” says Nic. “A square canvas with a bar going from left or right, a bit like an Etch A Sketch with three handles.” The drawing implements are each attached to the bar, moved with pieces of string left, right and up or down. A bike lever is then used as a trigger to take the pen off and on the paper. “It’s weird because you’re never doing a drawing motion, you’re pulling at a piece of string. It’s not even like you have three hands on one pencil, you have three hands on an object controlling the pencil.” For the construction to work Will, Jay and Nic would have to direct each other constantly. “It’s like trying to tell somebody exactly what you’re thinking for four hours,” elaborates Nic. “Because there’s three of us, we got better at it, but at the beginning we didn’t talk that much and soon learned you have to talk all the time. If you don’t talk about every little thing, you can forget that someone is going from left to right and you’re not, for instance.”

https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/nous-vous-illustration-310517

Lotte Reiniger, a pioneering German animator, developed her own version of the multiplane camera in the 1920s to enhance her silhouette films. Long before Disney popularised the technique, Reiniger built a system of glass planes stacked at different levels, each holding paper cut-out figures, backgrounds, and scenery. By moving elements independently and adjusting their distance from the camera, she created depth, perspective, and dynamic motion within her intricate shadow animations. This innovation gave films like The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) a remarkable three-dimensional quality. Reiniger’s multiplane method was both technically inventive and artistically poetic, influencing generations of animators.

Stéphane Mallarmé’s unfinished project Le Livre (“The Book”) was a radical vision of literature as an infinite, universal work. Conceived in the late 19th century, it was less a conventional book than a total artwork: endlessly reconfigurable, performative, and capable of encompassing all knowledge. Mallarmé imagined it as a sacred, almost ritual object, to be experienced collectively in staged readings. Though never realised, his meticulous notes reveal a system of permutations and mathematical structures governing its form. Le Livre profoundly influenced modernist and avant-garde ideas of the book as a conceptual medium, blurring boundaries between text, performance, and cosmos.

Robert Fisk’s Reading Machine was an experimental device created in the 1930s to improve reading speed and efficiency. Designed for education and accessibility, it presented text one word or phrase at a time through a mechanical display, training the eye to focus and reducing the back-and-forth scanning typical of traditional reading. Fisk’s invention embodied modernist ideals of progress, mechanisation, and the streamlining of human cognition. While never widely adopted, it influenced later discussions around speed-reading, ergonomics, and the relationship between technology and literacy. The Reading Machine stands as both a curiosity and a precursor to digital text-display systems.

Images from: www.engadget.com/2018-07-06-backlog-fiske-reading-machine.html

Ángela Ruiz Robles Mechanical Encyclopedia
As someone deeply caring for her students and passionate about education, Ruiz Robles designed her mechanical encyclopedia to lighten the weight of the books carried by her students, make learning more attractive, and adapt learning materials to the needs of each student.[1] Her device consisted of a series of text and illustrations on reels, all under a sheet of magnifying glass with a light for reading in the dark, and was to incorporate spoken descriptions of each topic. Her device was never put into production but a prototype is in display at the National Museum of Science and Technology in A Coruña.[4]

Francis Bacon’s Sound House, described in New Atlantis (1627), was an imaginary research institute devoted to the study and manipulation of sound. It formed part of his utopian vision of Salomon’s House, where knowledge was systematically pursued for human advancement. The Sound House anticipated modern acoustics: Bacon imagined experiments in sound transmission, amplification, recording, and transformation, including echoes, artificial voices, and novel instruments. Though fictional, it expressed his belief that science could harness natural phenomena for discovery and utility. The Sound House remains a striking early articulation of sound technology’s potential, foreshadowing later innovations in audio engineering and media.

In New Atlantis, Bacon describes a fictional scientific institution called the House of Salomon, which functions as an early vision of a research institute, museum, and think tank. Its mission is the discovery of knowledge and the betterment of society through science, exploration, and innovation.
Relevant passages describe:
 

• Experimental instruments and devices
• The collection and codification of knowledge
• The creation and preservation of books, observations, and visual materials

 
This has strong parallels to artists’ books:
 

• Documentation as art: Artists’ books often present experimental research, personal archives, or poetic systems.
• Invention of new forms: Bacon’s imagined devices and cataloging systems echo how artists invent new book forms to express ideas.
• Knowledge as aesthetic: Like the House of Salomon’s blending of science, craft, and spectacle, artists’ books often merge form and function to reflect the nature of inquiry itself.

An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1972), Daphne Oram does use the word “celetal”—but not as a typo. She intentionally coins “celetal”, playing on “cele”, which is “elec” reversed, to evoke a kind of counterpoint between the celestial (spiritual, creative) and the electric (technical, electronic) en.wikipedia.org+15paperzz.com+15daphneoram.org+15.

From Resonance- The Journal of Sound & Culture (vol 2, issue 4 Winter 2021)
In her book An Individual Note (1972), Daphne Oram developed multiple extended analogies between humans and electronic sound technologies. Oram used these to suggest how “music and information theory, allied to technology” might be applied to mental health; and to support her design for a machine that would preserve human qualities through its interactivity and musical results. This music machine, Oram wrote, “is based mainly on controlled feedback and the computing of resultants.…It is a control system which could be applied to many fields, as well as music.”

John Cage
In summary, Cage used the star atlas as a tool for removing control, inviting randomness, and connecting music to natural systems—all core principles of his avant-garde and philosophical approach to art.

Atlas Eclipticalis:
​John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62) is a large-scale orchestral work inspired by star charts from Antonín Bečvář’s Atlas Eclipticalis (1958). Cage used the constellations’ positions to determine pitches and structures, aligning his compositional process with chance operations and the natural order of the cosmos. Scored for up to 86 instruments, the work allows performers significant freedom: parts may overlap, enter, or fade independently, creating a dense, shimmering texture of sound. Its indeterminacy challenged traditional orchestral hierarchies and provoked controversy at its premiere. Today, Atlas Eclipticalis is seen as a landmark of Cage’s exploration of chance, space, and cosmic scale in music.

My Abstract for the Illustration research conference: 

 My proposal for my paper explores how mechanical and coded systems shape contemporary illustration practice by examining the intersection of sound, book arts, and historical apparatuses. My research focuses on Tapestry Sound Book (2019), an artist’s book that encodes sound through woven patterns, drawing connections between the heritage of mechanical music devices, illustration, and experimental book forms. 

My illustration practice is rooted in a lineage of mechanized creative processes, from the Jacquard loom- an early computational system using punched cards- to mechanical music boxes, player pianos, and early printing technologies. My bookworks align with Sound Weaving, a practice that translates textile patterns into musical compositions, demonstrating how historical craft traditions inform contemporary digital and machine-based art. These encoded systems establish links between sound and image. 
 My proposal for my paper explores how mechanical and coded systems shape contemporary illustration practice by examining the intersection of sound, book arts, and historical apparatuses. My research focuses on Tapestry Sound Book (2019), an artist’s book that encodes sound through woven patterns, drawing connections between the heritage of mechanical music devices, illustration, and experimental book forms. 
My illustration practice is rooted in a lineage of mechanized creative processes, from the Jacquard loom- an early computational system using punched cards- to mechanical music boxes, player pianos, and early printing technologies. My bookworks align with Sound Weaving, a practice that translates textile patterns into musical compositions, demonstrating how historical craft traditions inform contemporary digital and machine-based art. These encoded systems establish links between sound and image.