Manchester Illuminated Universal Turing Machine, #23

Roman Verostko

Manchester Illuminated Universal Turing Machine, #23 , – ongoing
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Mnemosyne
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Description
THE MANCHESTER
ILLUMINATED UNIVERSAL TURING MACHINE
by Roman Verostko, 1998

The Project: A family of algorithmic pen plotted drawings, each presented with the binary text for a Universal Turing Machine (UTM), was created for an exhibition in Manchester on the occasion of the Ninth International Symposium on Electronic Art (1998). They were created as homage to Alan Turing celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the first computer with a stored program, the Manchester "Baby" compute. Known also as the "Mark I prototype", it would have been the first "hard wired" UTM.

These drawings, reminiscent of medieval manuscript illuminations, celebrate Alan Turing's concept of a UTM by presenting it as a valuable precious text of our own time. Executed on hot pressed Arches, each work includes a burnished gold leaf enhancement.
Keywords
  • subjects
    • Arts and Visual Culture
      • drawings
Technology & Material
Software
Procedure. The artistic procedure employs a form-generation method which, by analogy to biological process, may be viewed as epigenetic. The software (code), created by the artist, behaves as genotype capable of generating a distinctive “family of forms” within any given set of parameters. The hyperspace of all possible forms, based on the specific parameter settings for this Manchester edition, is infinitely vast. This page pictures 5 specific examples from those created for this project.
Manchester Illuminated Universal Turing Machine, #23
1998, 30" by 22"
pen plotted drawing with gold leaf

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Exhibitions & Events
Bibliography
2 publications