UNTITLED CANDY MACHINE (2023)
Durational Performance-Object
currently installed in CO-OPt Research + Projects, Lubbock, TX
Durational Performance-Object
currently installed in CO-OPt Research + Projects, Lubbock, TX
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M&M stands for Forrest Mars, the developer of a method of covering chocolate in a candy shell patented in 1941, and Bruce Murrie, the son of the president of Hershey Chocolate Company. Mars's technique was an attempt to reproduce British Smarties, a candy he discovered did not melt in the hands of soldiers fighting in the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, M&Ms were included in US soldiers' rations and were not available to the general public. The material properties of M&Ms made them especially valuable for military missions in warm climates.
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Let's take a short trip from war candy to AI: After reading about the challenge posed by handwriting to optical character recognition, I took various handwritten M’s from a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) database and had them printed on M&M candies accessible through a coin-operated candy machine. What's called the NIST Special Database 19 contains handwritten letters and numbers from 2100 census workers from throughout the US and 500 high school students from Bethesda, Maryland. It was originally released in 1995 (although parts were released earlier) and then re-released, with updated file formats, in 2016. The total number of Handwriting Sample Forms included is 3699, considerably larger than 2100 + 500; I am doing further research to explain this discrepancy. Note the preamble to the US Constitution on the Handwriting Sample Form. The official handwritten Constitution has slightly different punctuation than the first printing of 1787, which added a comma to the opening. The Handwriting Sample Forms ask participants to reproduce the printed punctuation in a handwritten format that was digitized and modified to keep abreast of evolving technological needs. |
By NIST - https://www.nist.gov/srd/nist-special-database-19, Public Domain, Link
I am fond of this piece because it brings together writing, nationalism, civic identity (the handwritten signature as a fraught index of authentic human identity, as well as the drafted soldier), brand identity (the two M men), commerce, what machines can and can't do well, reading, AI, phase changes between hand-scripted and printed text, and candy.