ferniture

ferniture is an experiment in unhinging instruction. It recomposes early twentieth-century “how to” manuals on fern identification, furniture-making and singing into a speculative guide that blends different modes of making, growing and expressing.

The piece was created with a Python script using the requests, re, string and random libraries. The script gathers public domain texts and transforms them into a pool of sentence fragments by removing line breaks and splitting on punctuation. It then selects fragments at random from within the interior of each text - skipping introductions and endings - and recombines them into new sequences.

A selection of these sequences was manually curated into a new text synthesising technical instruction, embodied practice and natural description. The front and back covers were composed by layering illustrations from the original manuals.

ferniture was developed as part of Scrapism at the School for Poetic Computation.

It was featured in re•mediate issue 5.