Blank Archive begins with a paradox inherited from the digital versions of printed books: the notice “This page intentionally left blank” appearing on a page that is, evidently, not blank at all. That contradiction has stayed with me since I published the experimental book This page intentionally left blank (Lulu/Candonga, 2018), but here it shifts from the page of the book to the page of the browser, and from editorial convention to computational condition. What once functioned as a statement about layout now becomes a question about how absence is processed when writing, reading, and display are increasingly delegated to artificial intelligence systems.
The project asks what happens when blankness enters a technical environment that cannot easily accommodate it. Large language models are trained on trillions of tokens, yet the truly blank document seems to stand at the edge of that experience, as a limit case, a zero prompt, an empty context window, or a textual condition that resists ingestion while still demanding interpretation. In this sense, Blank Archive treats the blank page as a charged surface where the logics of computation and prediction become visible precisely because they cannot leave the page literally empty.
The work explores the conditions of writing and reading across natural language and programming language in the present landscape of generative AI. Its textual component, a list of 49 sentences, emerged through iterative exchanges in “Thinking mode” between a human (that’s me) and an AI chatbot. At the same time, the code for the webpages was produced almost entirely through vibe coding across multiple models, with only light editing afterward. In other words, the project is about the automated, unstable threshold where text becomes code, code becomes interface, and interface begins to speak back.
For designing the piece, six commercial language models were each asked to produce a micro-webpage from a single prompt. Each page had to prominently feature the sentence “This page intentionally left blank” while also permutating it through related formulations such as “This page intentionally contains no tokens,” “Training example intentionally left blank,” or “This completion intentionally left blank to preserve all possible completions.”
Using Perplexity.AI, each model was also instructed to simulate a historical permutation method, including Heap’s algorithm, Fisher–Yates’ shuffle, Steinhaus–Johnson–Trotter’s algorithm, Knuth’s Algorithm L (lexicographic order), Sattolo’s algorithm, and plain changes (aka change-ringing). Beyond that, the prompt imposed almost no stylistic constraint, allowing each system to reveal its own habits, defaults, excesses, and mannerisms through the page it produced.
Drift
The result is six competing versions of blankness, each carrying the aesthetic and procedural signature of the model that generated it. Some pages are spare and precise, others overdesigned or awkward, some frictionless, others obstructed by buttons, quirks, or unnecessary gestures that remain deliberately in place as part of the work. Rather than correcting these idiosyncrasies, Blank Archive preserves them as evidence that algorithmic systems do not merely execute instructions; they stage interpretation through form. Particularly when given carte blanche.
That instability is extended through an automatic redirection system: the six versions rotate at random every 40 seconds, which, according to recent studies, is the average human attention span. Instead of presenting absence as neutral or static, the work frames blankness as a structured and time-based condition, one that is encoded, interrupted, and continually reformatted by algorithmic procedures and interface decisions. What appears at first as repetition becomes a shifting field of subject positions, where meaning is redistributed through recurrence, variation, and (brute)forced transitions. In that sense, Blank Archive shares an affinity with Johanna Drucker’s argument that algorithmic writing is enunciative because it produces positions of address through iterative execution. The work makes visible that an algorithm does not simply permute tokens and an interface does not simply display them; both alter the position from which meaning is uttered, received, interpreted, and potentially contradicted. Against the fixed statement “This page intentionally left blank,” Blank Archive approaches blankness as an overdetermined structure: never outside language, never outside computation, never outside design, and never outside the systems now trained to continue from whatever is placed before them.
Bruno Ministro is a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Beja and a researcher at the University of Coimbra. He is also a poet committed to practice-based research as an alternative mode of knowledge production. His current research focuses on the automation of reading and writing, technological solutionism, and surveillance capitalism. Recent publications examine these topics in relation to experimental writing, digital media, and contemporary culture. His poetry books and digital works include tantascoisasparadizer (2013), quinquilharia (2014), 1_100 (2016), Collected Works (2017), Progress in Work (2021), and The Book of Ours (2025). These and other artistic and scholarly works can be found at hackingthetext.net.
Leave a Reply