Wave Scribe consists of custom build tables, handmade paper and custom designed and built plotting machine. The machine writes out the text of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick using a digitized form of my own cursive script. The transcription is altered, however, in height and slant by live data of the rise, fall and direction of ocean waves off the Oregon coast. Text of this great American novel, which reflects a cultural upheaval in our relationship to “nature” and the effects of technology brought on by the Industrial Revolution, is altered in form: passing through my handwriting and by way of the unceasing current of wave upon ocean wave. Waves are not material things; they are a transfer of energy through a medium. Spoken words cause an oscillation in the elastic medium of air reaching the ear of a listener by way of longitudinal waves of compressions and retractions. The development of writing was a radical materialization of language, a technology allowing for profound cultural changes. While scripts are thought to have begun as notches, knots and notations to keep track of material goods for commerce, this new materialized language allowed for new forms of transmission, resulting in literature and other poetic / philosophical plays of language forever changing our individual and collective brains.