Bread Reader
In the night, I SEE a light
Dancing LIGHTLY BETWEEN the trees
I SEE the old MILL
Standing firm, its blades KEEP turning
I SEE the world with new eyes
Written by a slice of bread.
It began in a studio about electronic waste.
Waste Machines, an Advanced Synthesis Options Studio at Carnegie Mellon's School of Architecture, fall 2024. We took discarded electronics apart to question planned obsolescence, and made something new from them.
A $10 toaster nobody claimed. A ten-year-old scanner from eBay.
Together they became
Bread Reader
A machine that reads a slice of bread, and turns it into a poem
Push the bread down, and the scanner reads it.
A capacitive sensor made of a resistor, a wire and aluminum foil starts the scan as you push. A button at the bottom stops it.
My sketches of the hack, step by step.
I took over the scanner's power, its button and its motion.
No backup scanner, a casing that would not open, tiny solder points on the switch, and many 3D-printed parts that never quite fit.
To the scanner, a slice is a picture.
Bread is data.
I wrote a program that reads its pores as words.
Each pixel's shade becomes a letter, darkest A to lightest Z. The letters around each pore are matched against 5,000 common English words.
ON a crooked path,
A FEMALE crow caws loud,
With feathers on her HEAD.
A fish with a GILL
Dances in the mist,
Whispering of LIFE.
CHAFF swirls like secrets,
“Shall I DECIDE to fly,
Or sink like the DEAD?”
A paper BILL flaps,
HIGH in a twisted tree,
Caught on a bright BEAM.
To FEED on the strange,
As shadows FALL like rain,
A rusty BELL peals.
Then the bread speaks.
The OpenAI API writes a poem around the found words, in the order they were found. The Mac reads it aloud, and the printer prints it.
At the Waste Machines exhibition, December 10, 2024.
Every slice writes a different poem.
Visitors took home their bread, and its poem.
A poem is only a few bytes. It can last for centuries.
- Role
- Concept, hardware hacking, fabrication, software
- Course
- Waste Machines, Advanced Synthesis Options Studio, Carnegie Mellon University, with Daragh Byrne
- Year
- Fall 2024
- Video
- Watch the demo