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New Testament.

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New Interface. New Testament

Media-poetry & Interactive installation. 2017

This work reveals the book as an electronic object that can provide an alternative to customary ways of interaction with text. It is possible to listen to the text of the Gospel According to Matthew via the interface of the object. The full text is deconstructed here. It is no longer linear; the book itself is not seen as a whole. Spectators get access to it through hyperlinks of the interface, which alters the usual materiality of the book.

The interface of the object is comprised by 33 buttons that correspond to keywords of the Gospel most frequently used in the text and central in the textual graph. These words are chosen algorithmically so that each line of the Gospel contains at least one of them. After pressing a button the spectator can hear a computer voice reading a line that contains the corresponding word. If they press the button again, another line of the Gospel containing the word will be heard. Thus by pushing all the buttons several times you can listen to all the lines of the book. If several buttons are pressed in one interaction one by one, the line that contains all the chosen words will be heard (or the notification that no such line exists in the text).

The four types of words from the interface are marked by key colours of the bible and make a pixellated Icon by their position. Materiality as well as the mathematics of choice is crucial to the work. This electronic book is accessible without the need of a provider or environment.

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