THE OTHER SHAPE OF THINGS- 2. Datamorphosis consists of 15 series of sculptures, called Libri (Books), based on the 15 books that comprise Ovid’s poem The Metamorphoses. Each series follows the corresponding book and is composed of a variable number of sculptures (ranging from 7 to 23). Each sculpture takes the name of one of Ovid’s myths and is produced by forcing a computer to interpret Latin verses about metamorphosis as coding instructions for the production of new sculptural forms.

Ovid’s text presents 181 foundational myths of Greco-Roman culture, divided into 15 books, for a total of 11,995 lines of rigid hexametric poetry. Using a text editor, I selected the lines corresponding to each myth and then pasted them inside the ASCII code of the digital model of a sculpture inspired by that specific myth. To produce each sculpture, I simply substituted the alphanumeric lines of code used by the computer to render the sculpture with the corresponding original Latin verses of poetry written by Ovid. For example, the first myth, “Primordial Chaos and Origin of the World,” corresponds to lines 5-75 of Ovid’s Libro I, which I inserted in place of the lines of code 5-75 of the first digital sculpture. My operation, repeated analogously for each sculpture, forces the Latin poem to function as source code for tridimensional forms. I have no control over how the computer will interpret the Latin poem – the final shape of the sculpture is the result of a metamorphosis of data outside my control.