Is the Internet becoming an entity? If the answer is positive, what are the characteristics of this being?, wonders Fang-Yu Lin.
Inspired by the Turing Test, he designed From The Great Beyond, a typerwriter that has (seemingly) a life of its own.
By typing on the keyboard of the custom robotic typewriter, you are able to “chat” with the Internet while the background application searches online resources for response. There’s not screen, the typewriter automatically prints out the resulting text or ASCII art on a paper roll for you to view or keep. Be it whimsical, intelligent or simply irrelevant, the typed words of the Internet reveal a fragment of truth regarding itself.
The existence of an invisible entity is suggested by the noise of the typing and flowing responses spit out from the typewriter.
Via exibart.
More typewriter: TTSM (Typewriter Tracklog Sewing Machine), by Alejandro Duque, uses a GPS device to track and save the data of a journey without destination; 22POP is a typewriter that sends typed letters as emails to your destinary; Life Writer turns the letters typed into artificial life creatures that appear to float on the paper of the machine.
Also: The Universal Digest Machine features a web spider that crawls the net, digesting web pages, outputting a brief analysis of their contents and printing it on a receipt.