Recursive Apologies: Janet Zweig’s Text Generating Sculptures 1990-2010

A guide to Zweig's algorithmically generated sculptures that anticipated contemporary Large Language Models

In the early 1990s, when personal computing was young and artificial intelligence was not yet a part of the popular imagination, American artist Janet Zweig (born 1950) made extraordinary and prescient creations: sculptures that married early computers, simple algorithms and dot-matrix printers with mechanical parts to auto-generate streams of poetic text that moved objects. Richly illustrated, Recursive Apologies presents these sculptures alongside the sources that inspired them. Sporting a recursive design that mirrors the very concepts it explores, the volume offers both a visual archive and a reflection on our ongoing relationship with thinking machines. It also features essays by artists and scholars Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Jena Osman and Johanna Drucker that evince how Zweig's witty contraptions were an early premonition of our current technological reality: an atmosphere of disinformation, fake news and digital hallucinations.