These were originally tiny objects which were inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s story of ‘the Aleph’ – a tale that revolves around a minute artifact which is “one of the points in space that contains all other points.”

Although they started out tiny, I later enlarged both of them into avatar scaled constructs and placed them on the ground level of the sim on big, slowly revolving platforms.

The project started out as a solar system. The idea was to turn something that we automatically tend to think of as very large into something that is very small, and thereby establish the contradiction that lies at the heart of ‘the Aleph.’ This architecture was named ‘Azimuth,’ in accordance with a number of Cartesian typographic elements that I deconstructed to build a decentralized planetary system that nevertheless revolved around a centralized solar chart.

However, as my building progressed, I soon began to realize that this strategy was far too literal, that it failed to address what was at the core of ‘the Aleph,’ as I had now begun to understand it through an extended journey of reading that took its trajectory from the story itself and that led me to places such as cyberpunk literature, the Kabala, numerology and its relation to the concept of ‘code’ as a basal life force that stretched from intangible abstractions such as mysticism and music to the tangibly concrete such as biology and the workings of computers.

The outcome was a second construct which I called 'Cypher' that can be seen in the background of the image above.