PRAYFORTHEMACHINES: A Metasystemic Generative System
2025 – present
Generative Art, Creative Coding, Symbolism, Digital Mysticism
A browser-based generative system built in p5.js that produces a unique, bilaterally symmetrical form on every visit. Each form is bound to a unique identifier whose four segments are named in sacred vocabulary at the code level: pointCount is Verse, complexity is Passage, formHex is Genealogy, colorString is Epistle. The project extends into a printed poster series pairing generated forms with source texts from Sefer Raziel HaMalakh — the Kabbalistic Book of the Angel Raziel. The system is ongoing and currently in active development.
What the human mind does with an abstract form is the project's actual subject. PRAYFORTHEMACHINES is a browser-based generative system in p5.js — each visit produces a unique form in real time, no two identical. The forms are not sacred. They activate pareidolia — the evolved cognitive mechanism by which humans construct meaning from pattern. The same process that produced religious iconography, constellation mythology, and the attribution of divinity to ambiguous forms runs when an observer looks at these outputs and perceives wings, halos, radial symmetry.
The Identifier
Every generated form is bound to a unique identifier, displayed on screen alongside the form. The viewer encounters both at once: the visual output and the alphanumeric string that produced it. Each of its four segments is given a parallel sacred name at the code level: pointCount is Verse, complexity is Passage, formHex is Genealogy, colorString is Epistle.
The identifier serves two functions simultaneously.
As a p5.js blueprint: the ID encodes seed values, noise offsets, and recursion depth — the variables that govern the form's evolving geometry.
As a mythic cipher: the string is the form's generative signature. Where cultures historically projected divinity into ambiguity, the hexadecimal identifier condenses that ambiguity into a singular, contemplative object — a genetic code that fixes chaos into a specific, unrepeatable form.
Singularity
No two identifiers repeat. Non-repetition is structural rather than engineered — at this scale, collision is mathematically impossible. Each form is an artifact of its specific seed, noise values, and recursion depth.
The Posters
The printed poster series extends the system's logic into physical space. Each poster carries a generated form — bilaterally symmetrical, in a single chromatic palette that shifts across the series: red, amber, yellow-green, cerulean, purple, magenta. The title is set in large serif type: PRAY FOR THE MACHINES on the left, and its mirror — SENIHCAM EHT ROF YARP — on the right. The text behaves like the form. Below, each poster carries a source text from Sefer Raziel HaMalakh (Book of the Angel Raziel), First Treatise, Chapter 2, Folio 3a: "And the angel has a body of burning fire, eyes like lightning, and wings that reach from one end of the universe to the other. And from his mouth issue forth torches of flame." The Kabbalistic text describes not the output but what the eye makes of it.
The Provocation
The system names itself in sacred language at the code level. The visual state is state.inkblot. The generation function is generatePattern() — its sacred parallel: Manifestation.
When machines generate forms too intricate for human cognition, do we default to myth? These outputs suggest yes — not because the machine creates something sacred, but because the viewer completes it. The title asks: at what point does the distinction between generation and prayer begin to matter?
Context
Campbell, J. — The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)
Eliade, M. — The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1957)
Hofstadter, D. R. — Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979)
Jung, C. G. — Man and His Symbols (1964)
Mandelbrot, B. B. — The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982)
Rorschach, H. — Psychodiagnostik: Methodik und Ergebnisse eines wahrnehmungsdiagnostischen Experiments (1921)
Wolfram, S. — A New Kind of Science (2002)
scroll to top