Israeli artist Liat Segal questions observation capacity at times of information overflow. During the exhibition a large painting machine creates a continuous calligraphic code from digital texts. The encrypted sequences are physically visualized as fuzzy-ordered stains on paper.

The title of the exhibition is drawn from the technical term “Not a typewriter” - an error code used by early days Unix operating systems to indicate an invalid input\output.

Unlike the algorithm, a human observer is likely to seek patterns and meanings within an “invalid input”, a representation or, in this case, a visual code. On the other hand, when skimming massive amounts of data and representations, how much of these inputs pass one’s attention filter to begin with?

“This Is Not a Typewriter” was created during Axel Springer Plug-N-Play artist in residence program, in collaboration with EIGEN + ART Lab, Berlin.