451ºF is the temperature at which books ignite and burn. When written with OCR-A font (optical character recognition or optical character reader), it can be recognized by automated systems. The font is often used for the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.

The idea for this work has its genesis in the 1966 François Truffaut film Fahrenheit 451, itself adapted from the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel of the same name. 451º Fahrenheit is stated to be the temperature at which book paper burns. In reality, it is not so precise – factors include the type of paper and humidity. The film portrays a compliant society in which books are banned because reading them is alleged to make people feel unhappy. If someone is found to have books, they are arrested and the books are publicly burned by a fire crew. Since all buildings are non-flammable, the sight of a fire truck and crew prompts a small boy to cry out: “Look Mummy, there’s going to be a fire!”

The images of the burning of books from 1930s Germany are well-known, but the burning of books has a much longer history, some occurrences dating from before the Christian era. Book burning functions primarily as a tool in the suppression of ideas and identity, or as an aggressive or an intimidatory act towards a group, for example, the burning of the Koran that seems to occasionally delight neo-fascists in continental Europe and Scandinavia. 451ºF points to this history and warns of what may follow in our polarised world, where there are continual efforts to control, alter and censor information and instead – produce disinformation.
As much as a nod to book burning rituals, 451ºF hints at the steady and, it seems, inevitable rise of global temperature. It talks about our dependence on the environment, as our habitat is not given and not fixed. The limits of our physical existence can be measured and expressed in numbers as easily as the temperature at which paper burns. The fact that 451ºF is written with OCR-A font sends our imagination to the fictional future, when there may no longer be any humans to warn and but only machines.