Welcome to The Montaigne Machine, a work of electronic literature that invites you to participate in the creation of multimedia personal essays.
The essays generated by The Montaigne Machine each center on a specific topic taken up by the inventor of the genre, Michel de Montaigne. The essays combine text from Montaigne’s famous Essais, first published in 1580 and here translated into English, with original text from each visitor who uses the machine. These texts are placed within an image that has been uploaded by a photographer on Flickr, designated as available for remixing, and most recently tagged with a term appropriate to the essay’s topic. The resulting essay is a collaboration, perhaps even a conversation, across time and media by three artists.
The Montaigne Machine is also an essay in itself: an attempt to see what emerges from a creative process that involves chance juxtapositions, wayward quotations, and unexpected insights, which isn’t a bad description of Montaigne’s own work. In “De l'Amitié,” Montaigne writes:
And what are these essays of mine, in truth, other than grotesques and monstrous bodies, patched together from varying parts, without any definite shape and with no order, unity, or proportion other than what comes from chance?
The Montaigne Machine was designed by Eric LeMay and is based in part on code generously provided by Christian “Kno” Knoflach on his blog Everything Deserves to Be Beautiful. You are free to share and remix this work. Plese note that the license for each photograph is available through the link to its photo credit. Eric can be reached at eclemay@gmail.com.