Lost Machine Manual is a generative print-based artwork that simulates the appearance of a forgotten technical document. Each page is algorithmically composed of procedural diagrams, schematic grids, and pseudo-engineering notes that blend machine logic with absurdity. The system produces unique pages—fragments of a manual for a device that no longer exists, or perhaps never did.
The visual language recalls mid-century industrial drawings and early computer printouts, rendered in strict black and white. Within these rigid systems, subtle failures and darkly humorous instructions emerge: phrases that sound functional yet imply emotional or moral decay. The work reflects on the collapse between human intent and automated process, treating bureaucracy, obedience, and entropy as shared conditions between living and mechanical systems.
Alongside its digital form, Lost Machine Manual is printed on a thermal printer—a device typically associated with ephemeral receipts and utilitarian data. Because of its heat-based printing process, the images gradually fade, reinforcing the work’s meditation on entropy, memory loss, and technological impermanence. Each page becomes a relic of an imagined infrastructure, a procedural fossil where technical order and existential doubt quietly coexist.
Created for the “Spark” exhibition by InfiniteInk × The Lighthouse as part of the Art on Tezos: Berlin event.