In her series of nine different paperback copies of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Stephanie Syjuco documents the effects of the retro-digitization of a literary text by transferring digitized versions of the novel downloaded from different online sources back into book form. In contrast to retro-digitization, one could speak of “retro-analogization.” For this purpose, she downloads the texts and “pours” them fully automatically into the standardized “container” of a print-on-demand paperback—which is always the same. The title is always the URL of the website from which the digital version of the text was taken.

In 2011, the series was part of an art installation titled Phantoms (H__RT _F D_RKN_SS). The corrupted subtitle already indicates that a text is unavoidably modified by its digitization. This problem is already apparent in some of the title pages of the series, where the missing spaces and inappropriate breaks destroy every unit of meaning, as seen here, for example: “Heart of / DarknessbyJ / oseph Conrad” (Heart of Darkness: fullbooks). The books include interposed Google ads, scanning and OCR errors, misplaced page breaks and intertitle pages, obsolete links, and (as in the case of the Gutenberg edition) extensive appendices with the terms of the license that regulate the access, distribution, and use of the digital content.

The book page that Syjuco wins back from the digitized text is thus ineradicably shaped by computer logic, as well as by the politics of digitization and circulation of each text repository. Her “re-edition” adds another twist to the rich and, at least since the allegation of racism levied by Chinua Achebe, ideologically hotly contested reception history of Conrad’s story, which is so profound and extensive that Syjuco speaks of “an inadvertent rewriting” (artist website). Each of the paperbacks in the series thus not only contains Conrad’s text, it also tells the story of its circulation, reception, and transmission, to which digitization adds a new chapter: “These Print on Demand volumes represent a physical epitome of the effects of digital circulation over the original text” (Silvio Lorusso, Extending Horizons).

This medial reformatting is by no means just a problem for literary works, as Syjuco demonstrates in a three-minute video loop and a music collection that complement the book series. The found footage film compiles the warning “This film has been modified” that precedes many film and video format translations on YouTube. Proxy Audio Manifestion (Total Bootleg Collection) “displays hundreds of handmade replicas of all the digital music files I have illegally downloaded.” Thus, it “utilizes digital/analog retranslations to push forward the idea of how narrative and authorship shifts across different surfaces” (artist website).

In 2013, Syjuco also made three re-editioned print-on-demand versions of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. They are archived by the Library of the Printed Web (curated by Paul Soulellis, now available in the MoMA Library, New York).