The Nine Billion Names of God

Couch potato effect
The Nine Billion Names of God video still March 2011.
Couch potato effect
The Nine Billion Names of God video still March 2011.
Couch potato effect
The Nine Billion Names of God video still March 2011.
Couch potato effect
The Nine Billion Names of God video still March 2011.
Processing installation / 4m33s video.

This work is an exploration of the languages of religion around the world. I was inspired by the 1953 Arthur C. Clarke story of the same name in which Tibetan monks are trying to enumerate all the nine billion names of god, after which the universe will come to an end. They hire Americans to use a computer to speed up the operation and the story ends with the line, "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

In this work I have drawn on many sources to gather the names of god from many different religions - in different languages and scripts. I have animated the words and created a soundscape that mixes crowdsourced audio recordings in Arabic, Hebrew and Avestan as well as machine synthesized enumeration of all the possible names in English.

This work was shown at the Julliard School as part of their Music Technology Center's "Beyond the Machine" program in collaboration with The Streaming Museum in March 2011.

[ Electronica | Home ]