Emmalyn Hawthorne

Work:

A Library of Libraries,
Ways of Knowing- Tracing Place,
Kerning RM,
Kerning TCB,
Astrolabe TCB,
Orrery,
Things to have on a night stand,
Sky as Syntax,
Don't drink the milk!?

Writing:

Entangled,
[...] flows through the line break or ends at it.,
{dys} functional,
2 September 2019

About,
Media,
CV,
Instagram,
Contact

OCR Skyline Project

A Library of Libraries

Aaron Perkins, Alma Sammel, Amelia Watson, Archiving the Present / Tania Cañas, Charlie Lee, Darla Gabrielle Tejada, Đất Nước Library, Dogstar / Aeva Milos, Elena Hogan, Emmalyn Hawthorne, Esther Anatolitis, Jasmin Seale, Jessi Ryan, Jordana Infeld, Kaiqi Li, Karina Miriklis, Kitty Owens, Lea Rose, _ Leisa Shelton / Fragment31, Liam Vaughan, Madelaine Mackaway, Molly Stephenson, Melbourne Art Library, N0 R3PLY, Dr Niamh White, Pagbasa Archive, Roundtable Readings / Lili Grace Ward, Saluhan Collective, Sarita Slater, Silent Army Archive, The Commons Library, Queer Theory Reading Group / Zoë Bastin

Curated by Grey Dear

*

For Blindside’s March activation, A Library of Libraries, the gallery became a place of convergence for many of Narrm’s independent libraries, community collections, experimental archives & para-institutional researchers.

Collections of books, historical artefacts, art works, everyday objects, embodied knowledge and more were housed in the gallery and made available for public browsing. Brought together, these existing bodies of knowledge formed a 'a library of libraries.'

There were many ways to experience the library, whether popping by or staying for the day. Visitors were invited to join for workshops, reading groups, on-site archiving, performances, and other events, or stay for as long as they liked to browse, read, rest, or work from the space.

Installation view: 'A Library of Libraries', 2026, curated by Grey Dear. Image courtesy of Minh An Phạm.

The OCR Skyline Project is a hand-coded digital archive of experiments in which I use optical character recognition software (OCR) to ‘read’ skylines. The OCR interprets the skyline as though it was handwriting, comparing the curves and angles to its database of written text. Sometimes just jumbles of letters and punctuation come out and other times whole words or phrases (poems).

Piggybacking off my artist website, the project allows the text to be viewed alongside the skyline that generated it, or alongside the sky image from the original photograph. It can also be organised alphabetically by text output.

For me, the project exists as an unfinished and ongoing artwork/archive/library of speculative and experimental research as I explore the following:
1. Skylines and words are similar in that the way we perceive them depends upon our own positioning within both physical and cognitive landscapes. Always in flux, they evolve and morph as we continue to interact with them over time.
2. How to respectfully and sensitively trace lines back through times, perspectives, and our, frequently destructive, use of the landscape and of words.
3. How do etymological and geographic histories shape our experience of words and place?

For A Library of Libraries, this project was shown on a desktop computer within the space, referencing the self-service kiosk computers traditionally available in libraries.