The first spread of The Comet consists of the entirety of chapter 34 of The Education of Henry Adams (1905), a once-revered work of 20th century autobiographical nonfiction that is today largely forgotten. In the text, Adams muses pessimistically about the accelerating development of culture, knowledge, and technology over his lifetime, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. He analogizes the whole of humanity to a kind of meteorite that is passing a planet and picking up a dangerous degree of speed. Printed in The Comet, the font-size is small, the text barely legible, in two giant imposing columns on large facing pages.

The second spread was created by feeding this chapter to ChatGPT 3 with a prompt to simplify Adams' text slightly, making it more "modern and approachable," while keeping most of the language the same. Each subsequent spread was then generated by recursively taking the result of the previous spread, and feeding the output text back into the program, with the same prompt. With each iteration, Adams' distinctive voice and prose style is progressively drained of its color. The text gets terser, simpler and more informal, and the font gets larger. The book ends when the text has been reduced to a terse blurb, almost a slogan. As the original text is computationally dumbed down, a new field of meanings emerges.

2024. 11.25 x 13.25". 20 pages. Signature-sewn hardcover. Cream linen cloth with fabric transfer graphic. Interior pages printed on rice paper. Edition of 100.