Eight rough mockups of installation ideas, each one playable here in the browser. Think of them as sketches for rooms at a gallery like Serpentine: the real versions would use projectors, speakers and sensors in place of a mouse.
Move, drag, click and type in each one. Sound is optional and starts only when you press a sound button.
The midrash says the Torah was written in black fire on white fire. Here the letters burn dark. Wherever your "shadow" falls, the white fire between them lights up and leaves a fading trail, so the meaning appears in the gaps you create.
A dark room, a floor-to-ceiling projection and a depth camera. Visitors' real shadows open up the light. With a crowd, the whole wall turns white.
Ruth 1:16, "Wherever you go, I will go… your people shall be my people." It stops before the Divine Name on purpose. Build with TouchDesigner, or p5.js plus a Kinect/Orbbec camera.
A living piece of woven light. It calculates real London sunset for this week. At candle lighting it fades to dark by itself and stays dark until Havdalah on Saturday night. Try the jump button and wait 30 seconds.
Visitors who come on Saturday find the room dark, with one card that says the work is resting. The gallery's opening hours and the artwork's own calendar disagree, and that's the point: a machine that rests.
Candle lighting is 18 min before sunset. Havdalah is when the sun is 8.5° below the horizon. These are placeholders. The real piece would follow your community's own luach (calendar), which your rabbi can confirm.
Open the full prototype of The Returners, with a map of London, walks to Bevis Marks, Lauderdale Road and Holland Park, and GPS on your phone.
The journey of the Spanish & Portuguese Jews, from the anusim ("the forced ones") who were made to convert, to their descendants who returned openly. As you move closer to a station, its voice gets louder and its words appear. The last station is you, choosing to return in 2026.
Headphones and a phone app that plays sound based on location. You walk from Bevis Marks in the City to Kensington Gardens, and your GPS position mixes the voices. Your own conversion journal is the final track.
Recorded voices (Ladino, Portuguese, Hebrew prayers, sung by community members who agree to take part), mixed with Unity or a web audio engine and GPS. The tones here are synthesised stand-ins in a Sephardic-sounding mode.
A Talmud page layout. One verse sits in the centre and commentary grows around it. Each comment opens with the bolded words it responds to, the way a real daf does. Add a reading and it joins the margin. The grey comments are examples.
A wall-sized page. Visitors speak into a lectern, and their words are transcribed and set into the margins. Over months the page fills with centuries-style argument written by strangers. At the end it's printed as an edition.
Ruth is the model of the convert, and the Talmud (Yevamot 47b) reads these very lines as a conversation about conversion. Your own study becomes the first layer of commentary.
Sefer Yetzirah places the 22 letters on a wheel. Every pair forms a "gate", which gives 231 gates. Tap letters to open gates between them. Each letter's pitch comes from its place in the aleph-bet, and "Permute" plays your letters in new orders, as Abulafia's meditations did.
A circular floor of 22 pressure pads. Visitors walk between letters, drawing the gates in light on the floor and playing a chord that the whole room hears. Every visitor leaves a new pattern.
Arduino with pressure sensors, Max/MSP or Tone.js for sound, and a ceiling projector. Ask your rabbi how to handle combinations that would spell Divine Names.
In the legend, a golem is animated by the word emet, truth, written on its forehead. Erase the first letter and it reads met, dead, and the clay falls back to the earth.
An AI "golem" trained only on S&P melodies recorded with the community's consent, sung back through a clay-coloured particle body. Any visitor can switch it off by wiping one letter. The off switch is part of the artwork.
It joins the conversation about consent, data and AI that Serpentine's Arts Technologies programme cares about, told through the oldest Jewish story about making a living thing from words.
You look down at still water. Touching it makes ripples. Holding takes you under: the light goes blue, the sound drops and muffles, and bubbles rise past you. When you let go, you come back up to the surface, changed.
A round room with a projected water floor and a low bench around the edge. Visitors lower themselves and the room's sound and light "submerge" around them. It evokes the threshold without imitating the ritual itself.
A mikveh must hold at least 40 se'ah of water, much of it rain or spring water that was never drawn by hand. The real piece could use rainwater collected in the park, measured on the wall as it fills.
A city of streets. On a weekday the eruv line is invisible and you can take the key anywhere. On Shabbat the thin wire appears. Inside it the whole city counts as one home, so you can carry. Try taking the key across the line.
A phone AR piece. Point your camera up at London's real poles and wires and they glow, turning a hidden piece of infrastructure into a visible outline of a community's home.
Mapped eruv routes (with the eruv's own authority involved), Mapbox or Leaflet for the map, and ARKit or 8th Wall for the AR. The boundary here is invented and doesn't follow any real eruv.