The autopoetic printer is a wifi-enabled (by way of Raspberry Pi) dot matrix printer that takes a text and prints it on a continual loop of paper. In order to create the loop the printer needed to be capable of continuous paper feed in the form of fan-fold paper, and needed to have a tractor feed to pull the paper through rather than pressure rollers. The use of a dot matrix printer is important because it is a system that is now out of date, and has been revised many times in time since it was initially conceived, but still functions as intended. The simple machine system, paper on a loop going through a mechanical printer that is reproducing a text, creates a representational autopoetic system. Continually reproducing the text over itself, the word ‘auto’ also refers with etymological literality to automatically created or generated poetry. The system is set up to collide a text with itself and generate new meaning from the overlapping words and symbols. The words that remain visible take on new meaning by the syntactical rearrangement created in the variations of the system itself and in the combination of the machine system with the text system that it prints.
