This is the eighth edition of Moby Dick in this body of work.

For several years I have been building a procedural engine to compose illuminated manuscript pages — gothic text, ornamental capitals, vectorized illustration — layered and arranged by algorithm. Melville’s white whale persists as my source text: a poetic constant for the unattainable, and a control variable for an evolving experiment.

The manuscripts are authored by machine but rendered by machine also — CNC routers and pen plotters dragging ink across paper, tracing paths that were computed but never drawn by hand. The physical output obscures its digital origin. What remains is an object that carries the weight of meticulous time and labor, even as the hand that made it is mechanical.

Each edition refines the system. Each page is unique. The whale is never caught.