The Bible
Although brought up catholic and therefore familiar with the bible from an early age, I neglected it for years, until some years ago, as an artist, I became interested in working with language and text and decided to read the bible from the beginning.
Reading it daily was a wonderful experience of space and time, even though I stopped before the end of the old testament due to a stay abroad. One of the things thing that fascinated me was the fact that each verse was numbered.
And from this developed an idea for an electronic text display that would show one verse each day, until after a number of years the entire bible will have passed through it and the display can be destroyed.
If one verse is shown each day it would take the display 13 years to show the entire bible. (LEDs lose about 30% quality in 11 years)
There are a maximum of 250 characters per verse: with characters 5 cm high the display, for one line a verse, would be about 11 metres long.
In the line, besides the text, there will also be space for the name of the book, the number of the chapter and the number of the verse.
The number of active LEDs – and therefore the length of the light-line – will differ per verse.
The text is composed from the left hand side, the line will therefore have a different length each day.
The display could be situated on the facade of a museum or another (church) building,
but in any case on existing architecture in such a way that the framework draws as little attention as possible and only the illuminated line of text is the defining image.
The transition to the next verse would happen at midnight or midday in a gently flowing movement.
The display would be executed in white LEDs.
| year | 2006 |
| brief description | proposal for LED display showing one verse from the bible each day (appr. 13 years till end) |