THE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD

BY Yashas Shetty (IN)

An audio collage of numerous orgasmic utterances of the word ‘God’ downloaded from the internet.

Nine Billion Names of God is a bot that searches for the word 'God' in porn and downloads the audio, inspired by a short story about Tibetan monks who seek to list all of the names of God. The bot is 'trained' to find instances of orgasms where the word 'God' is uttered and using the tropes of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it compiles a downloadable .mp3 file. Every Sunday, the program uploads a new mp3. It will stop once it collects 9 billion cries for God, the quantity of utterances thought by Tibetan monks to call an end to the universe.

EXHIBITOR BIOGRAPHY

Yashas Shetty lives and works in Bangalore/India. He was artist in residence at Experimental Media Arts (EMA) program at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore (2006/2007), and at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore (2007). He was also founding faculty of the Centre for Experimental Media Arts at the Shrishti School of Art, Design and Technology.

Since 2007, Yashas Shetty has been giving several workshops as an individual educator or with the Hackteria collective, including workshops at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology (2010), National Institute of Design (NID), Bangalore (2009), Taipei National University of Arts, Taipei/Taiwan (2009), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA/USA (2009).

He participated in group exhibitions like Notes from Utopia, Taipei Biennial (2012) and Ghosts in the Machine, Apeejay Media Arts Gallery, Neu Delhi/India (2006).

Yashas Shetty received the Charles Wallace India Award (in collaboration with the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation and Gasworks, 2012) and honorary mentions in the category »Hybrid Arts« at the Ars Electronica Festival, Linz/Austria (2011 and 2012).