In the Gogol-Graph I use graphs to reimplement one of the central works of N. Gogol “Dead Souls”. Mathematics in this work is pretty simple: I created a graph of the words of the novel, assuming the mutual occurrence of two words in the sentence is an edge between them with the weight equal to the number of such occurrences. The “Dead Souls” graph is a small large data, with 10,000 entities, and 20,000 links. I wrote the algorithm to find the centrality (center) in this graph — the strongest (hard) peaks and edges, or more precisely the strongest combination of 50 strong words and their connections — the prepared soul, disjoint from the “Dead Souls”. These are the entities and their connections (edges) I brought to the physical interface of the work. Physical as opposed to computer, discarding an additional virtual medium- mediator for the life of the text.
You can press the button-word and all the words connected will light up. You can select the second out of them by pressing it, and the digital reader will loudly start reading out the text generated entirely from all scraps of “Dead Souls” phrases, where both words occur together in the same semantic unit. As a result, we have neither mathematics nor algorithms. As a result, a generative poetic text is born, which snatches away from the “Dead Souls” the essence: somewhere a language, somewhere key moments, somewhere just a text structure. And, not least importantly, this text has a material interface, in which the keywords are materialized. A word is a point in the text space. And two words define a directed vector of motion along it.
Example of the text for two key words - ничего (nothing) and нет (no) on Russian:
будто бы в комоде ничего нетtranslated into English:
like there's nothing in the drawerThe work was first presented at the exhibition «.TXT» in the Gogol’s House Museum, Moscow. It is a part of the museum collection now. Currently, the work is in Russian, I have plans for English translation.