When Tania and me traveled to Berlin this Feb for a conference called Transmediale, we had some time to do tourist stuff, so, we went to the Judisches museum.
Overall the museum is great, but what really caught my attention was a KUKA robotic arm writing the entire Torah…
The idea behind this installation, was to make a industrial robot write the Torah at human speed. The robot is equipped with a pen nib and ink and it wrote the entire five books of Moses on 80 meters of paper, using 304,805 hebrew letters.
The name of the installation was cool… BIOS [torah].
and of course it refers to the basic input/output system on which all computer’s programs build.
As an elementary component of computer technology, the BIOS is fundamental to the development of machines – just as Scripture is fundamental to the cultural history of human beings.
Here is a small video of the robot in action:
And this is a small gallery of the installation:
