Funny thing with the cover Hail to the Thief

Back in mid-00s i was trying to unsolve mystery - why people like Radiohead? I just couldn't get it - they were too boring to me. And still are. I find their music to be full of interesting ideas buried under nonplus performances and generic songs. That's my opinion. You don't have to agree.

The only thing i really liked about them was their visual presentation from 2000 to 2003-04, in particular the cover for their 2003 album Hail to the Thief. (I will write about Kid A blips someday). There was just something endearing about. It promised something else. 

Made by Stanley Donwood, the cover was a roadmap of sorts covered in advertising buzzwords mashed together in colorful blocks.

If you separate the cover from the album and look at it as a thing of its own - it is pretty good piece of conceptual writing.
This cover is all about plunder and recontextualization, hijacking of aesthetics and making it interesting again. While it definitely tried to replicate and multiply the vibe of Ed Ruscha spliced with opaque statements of Lawrence Wiener - it works as a statement on commodification of language.

The words are stacked in several columns, they represent commercial products and concepts in no particular order - just a whole bunch of stuff. It is kinda like listicles Roger Waters used to do in the latter days of Pink Floyd.

The sheer volume and density of content make it an open-ended piece. You can read it any way you like and construct your image sequence of the moment.

***
But i did something else. I like to OCR things that are usually not fit for OCR. My original intention was to shortcut typing down the words so that i could make some kind of a generative piece. However, the result was exceeded that.

Here's what i have got instead:

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***
One of the curious things that happens with OCR is that it requires keeping the input images straight in order to do the job right. Even the slightest presence of an artifact throws a wrench into the operation. The more artifacts or otherwise odd document features - less accurate the result.
That's what happened with the cover of Hail to the Thief.

There are bits and pieces of the original words sprinked here and there but the majority of words are mangled, sliced, chopped and screwed. At times, it looks like computer-generated madlib. Other parts looks like they were transcribed from a backwards speech.

But it made me think about the texts hidden underneath the texts on the images, the ones only an OCR algorithm can extract. I know why it happens that way, it is a side effect of the algorithm specification. But what does it means from the conceptual point of view?