Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
(Arthur C. Clarke, »The Nine Billion Names of God»)



Inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's short story of the same name and the international Human Genome Project, which was launched in 1990 with the goal of completely decoding the human genome (and which has been considered complete since 2003), the project design was for a computer sculpture in the form of a floor-to-ceiling prayer wheel, into which monochrome computer screens are embedded, on which the letters of the genetic code scroll down in endless permutations (6 years before the digital rain of The Matrix and 2 years before the similar opening credits of Ghost in the Shell) while at the same time moving from right to left. The program for this was written in AmigaBASIC for the C64.

The work, consisting of the project design (54 pages, 34x30 cm), the program code and a demo video of the screen, was created as part of the UNESCO symposium and artist workshop Babel: The Myth of Universal Understanding in Art, Science and Technology, directed by Fabrizio Plessi at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM), Cologne. An edition of the original design was also published as a scaled down reproduction (23x20.5 cm, edition of 60), supported with funds from the KHM, Cologne.

1993 awarded with the Karl Hofer Prize (today UdK Prize for Interdisciplinary Art and Science)
University of the Arts (today UdK) / Karl-Hofer-Society, Berlin