I · 9Generative Furniture2020

Every page of this book was decided by one keyword. A script queried Flickr for images tagged furniture and kept everything attached to them: the photographs, usernames, timestamps, camera models, coordinates, descriptions in a dozen languages.

The layout was handed over too. Built in JavaScript with Bindery.js, a browser-based book engine, the book paginates and composes itself, covers included: the front lists the photographers, the back the titles of their images. Curation happens alongside the code rather than ahead of it.

The keyword is generous. Chairs, sofas and tables, but also a motorcycle filed as a storage bench, a screenshot from what looks like a video game, a stack of chairs titled Chairity, and an empty chair captioned with a note about retirees in the Balkans who earn extra money weighing people on the street. The result sits somewhere between an archive, a cultural catalogue and an attractive accident.