Background

The direct indexical relationship between text and material is not only structurally embedded in the computer systems which manage, facilitate and entertain us in 2011 but rests in a history of science, belief, law and magic.  While text is compiled to machine code enacting the processes which turn on our street lights, render our videos and send data packets to the server, older societies performed other enactments of text, containing their own syntax and lexis. Religion (and the word is God), sorcerers, alchemists, writers of constitutions brought forth, with hubristic self-certainty, the world as we know it; spells, gold and human rights in that order.

Overview

Burj Babil (Tower of Babel) is an installation work consisting of two elements; a video projection (dimenstions variable) and a long (5m) strip of paper. The paper is a text print out of the source code used to generate a 3D computer model of the tower shown on the video projection. Throughout the file the text comments (in between the vertex and face information) reveal a story of creation, violent and degenerating into snatches of different languages the further through the document one reads.

To create the projected image, the source code file has been subjected to a number of tranformation processes which corrupt and destroy the tower in different phases. The processes transform the vertex and face coordinates from the source code file into ascii characters. The results are then fed into language translation services (babelfish.yahoo.com). Most of the file is ignored since the sequence of characters do not correspond to real words. However when chance causes the ascii sequence to form a recognisable word this will cause a corresponding physical translation of that vertex point. The resultant corrupted code is then used to re-make the model causing its eventual collapse.

The final result of this process is a number of video sequences showing the destruction of the tower as its source code file is translated into different languages.

Further

The myth of the Tower of Babel acts as a cautionary tale against man’s hubris – the act of defiance is punished by the scattering of the people, creation of different languages and ultimately the destruction of the tower itself. Like many utopian, monist visions, the simplicity of the project failed to materially engage with the material world. The tipping point between the world of a priori knowledge (mathematical, causal and ideal) and the necessarily contingent, confusion of lived experience generates new, and unexpected results.

Burj Babil uses the influence of different text sources, languages and material to create new architectural/material possibilities.