The Torah is my Dataset

"The Torah Is My Dataset and Machines Are My Prophets" (2023) is a work done in collaboration with Liat Grayver. It comprises a series of plotted pencil and pen drawings that I programmed based on text analysis and generation algorithms developed by the hacker V.Nos, (Black Hole Consulting) and with concept development and artistic curation by Liat Grayver. 

The work consists of abstract sequences of asemic glyphs drawn by a pen plotter on a sheet of paper. The glyph sequences are generated with a method inspired to the ancient Jewish Gematria system, which assigns numerical values to letters in an alphabet, typically for the purpose of uncovering hidden meanings and connections within words, phrases, and texts.

More specifically the glyph sequences are generated with the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS) algorithm, a method commonly used in Gematria and here applied to he first chapter of the book of Genesis. The algorithm  does not produce readable texts. However, feeding the Hebrew output to Google Translate and translating it to the another language such as English, does result in readable text. The output of this step is then re-translated to Hebrew, and each character is converted to a "cypher" of 22 abstract glyphs. 

The glyphs structures are generated by selecting a subset of the spanning trees of a graph with 5 vertices. The selected subset maximizes the "Wiener index" of the tree, that is how spread out the tree is based on the connected distance between each pair of vertices. The final composition is produced by concatenating and combining glyphs according to the sequences generated with ELS, applying geometric transformations and stroking effects to the resulting polygons and finally plotting the result with ink on paper.