Babel: The Seven Minute Scroll

In 2006 I began to think again about the handwoven canvases based on the biblical Babel text that I created in the 1980s. But now, using the same coded language and working at the computer, I created Babel: The Seven Minute Scroll. The scroll, created in the computer (48 feet wide x 2 feet high), is animated from right to left across the video screen for the duration of seven minutes, and then printed to paper. 

The world of Babel, in Mesopotamia, refers to a period of time which was changing from a herding to an agricultural and urban society made possible through the discovery of bitumen for mortar as a burnt brick technology. The story itself questions the social implications of such an advance as it suggests movement from a God-centered world to a human-centered world. The unity expressed in the first line of text—“and the whole earth was of one language and of one speech”—is displaced at the end of the story by a scattered race of humans who no longer understand one another: “and they were scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” 

Three languages, the phonetic roman alphabet, my coded grid language made of black squares in which drawings of the events of Babel appear, and floating shadows of pictographic figures from ancient Egyptian wall drawings, co-exist and move at different speeds to retell the story. As the work progresses, the visual language replaces the phonetic alphabet, a reflection on the contemporary world in which images dominate. 

In the original installation of this work, a video screen with the scanned text faces the wall with the printed scroll stacked in three strips, each 12 feet wide by 2 feet high.