MFT: Ariel Pink - Pom Pom Album Cover

This is a front cover for an Ariel Pink's album titled "pom pom". It was released in 2014 on a record label 4AD. It is one of my favorite album covers. But not because of its content but because of the creative possibilities it offers. The thing is - it is comprised of a handwritten text. And such as, it is quite ambiguous and for the lack of the better word - unassuming. The title also happened to be on a pink background. And when it is pink - you need to think pink and pink means you gotta move around a bit and put it upside down and backwards inside out.



The reason for that is simple. One of the virtues of a handwritten text is in the additional dimension such presentation brings to the perception of the information. Handwritten elements add something of an attitude to the text. It is an additional layer of information, a shade of sorts that can makes unseen seen. This addition provides an extra space for interpretations which can go far and wide, especially if there is no reason involved. This peculiarity is especially interesting if you extract out of the text something you weren't expecting or something that is definitily not there from comprehensive point of view.

On the surface, there is nothing special any way you look at it. "pom pom" got a simplistic cover in a minimalist tradition - just two words on a pinkish background scribbled in the lower right corner. However, your brain can connect the dots and realize that this is "pom pom" and not something else. But if you run the image of the cover through some optical recognition tools - you get something completely different and absolutely unexpected. Because machine doesn't know how to connect these dots - it just recognizes something it sees there. And sometimes this something is deeply within a Coil territory.

Why? Because the text on the cover is not exactly coherent for the OCR engine of any kind. The letters "p" are written a little bit disjointedly. The line and the circle are disconnected thus it is perceived as two separate letters - "i" and "o". Also "o" and the circle of the second "p" are connected together in a something reminiscent of a number "8". This is beyond OCR engine's comprehension. And these neat details throw an elaborate wrench into an OCR operation because the engine sees these letters differently. Thus comes the creativity in the machine and it nothing short of fascinating.

The situation gets even more dubious if you start to turn the image ninety degrees left and right and then turn it one eighty here and there and also mirror it horizontally and vertically. Every time time the engine recognizes something else, something that is not actually there but for whatever reason it is extracted out of it anyway. If you think about it - this operation is like a conjuring of sorts. There are numerous cryptic symbols. They mean nothing but they were there. And fi you combine the results of all OCR configurations - yout an intense lettrist poem straight out of ones-and-zeroes conscioussness.

Here's how it happened in my case:

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