This Master’s thesis explores what happens when reading becomes a computational process. Technologies such as OCR and LLMs are increasingly described as systems capable of reading, understanding, and generating text. This project questions that assumption by asking what machines actually do when they “read".

Taking OCR as its starting point, the research follows the transformation of text from visual marks into machine-readable data, revealing the processes through which text becomes computation. In doing so, it contrasts computational processing with human reading, understood not as the extraction of information but as an embodied and interpretative act through which meaning is constructed.

The project translates these otherwise invisible computational processes into a series of experimental tools, visualisations, and printed artefacts. Graphic design becomes a method of investigation, transforming the functional operations of computational reading into material for visual and critical inquiry.