Atomic Activity Books

Atomic Activity Books is an experimental publishing concern founded in 2008 by Karen ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato. We have worked exclusively together publishing artists books for 30 years. We publish experimental deviations and non-standard behaviours. In a current project, our custom-coded reading-machine is re-reading 'The Cloud of Unknowing', a 14th Century text written by an unknown author on piercing the “cloud of unknowing” which separates the human from the divine. Just as the mystical practices of 'The Cloud of Unknowing' are focused on finding a path to enlightenment through deliberate processes of ‘unknowing’, our automated-art-system seeks computational transcendentalism through processes of coded erasure, recursive redaction, and artificial illumination. The book is algorithmically ‘unknown’ one page at a time. Each and every edition of the nonhuman reading of 'The Cloud of Unknowing' is unique. A publishing experiment for a post-literate society, which increasingly defers its reading to nonhuman counterparts.