Drawn & AI-generated Reading Lists
2021-ongoing
Dylan Yamada-Rice
The aim of this work was to find ways of engaging art and design students in academic reading. I started out simply illustrating key parts of core texts, such as the in the following example:
Tsing, A. L. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the possibility of life in capatalist ruins.



I then decided to use a yonkoma (four panelled Japanese comics) to see if this could encourage students to draw out four favourite quotes from a piece of reading and then represent the overarching argument of a piece of academic writing in four panels, as is shown in the following example.
Rautio, P. (2013) Children who carry stones in their pockets: on autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies.




In the next stage I became interested in automation. What if I was to shuffle the illustrated quotes and find new connections between them. Could this serendipity promote new ideas and connections from the academic literature I was reading and asking MA students to read? At the begining this was a very rough and ready form of shuffling a wooden deck of quotes and then using stop motion animation to illustarate the shuffling and random connections. As four quotes per reading were not alot I began shuffling across literature to see if this brought about further engagement with intellectual ideas from writing.
From this I started exploring other possiblilties for making random connections and used an ai image generator to produce content using quotes from academic literature the following examples are taken once again from:
Tsing, A. L. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the possibility of life in capatalist ruins.



