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Ars combinatoria: mystical systems, procedural art, and the computer
Art Journal, Fall, 1997 by Janet Zweig
Then take ink, pen, and a table to thy hand and remember that thou art about to serve God in joy of the gladness of heart. Now begin to combine a few or many letters, to permute and to combine them until thy heart be warm. Then be mindful of their movements and of what thou canst bring forth by moving them. And when thou feelest that thy heart is already' warm and when thou seest that by combinations of letters thou canst grasp new things ... then turn all thy true thought to imagine the Name.
Later, as the process culminates, he writes: "Thy whole body will be seized by an extremely strong trembling, so that thou wilt think that surely thou art about to die, because thy soul, overjoyed with its knowledge, will leave thy body."[12] And a disciple of Abulafia writes that his teacher tells him,
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My son, if you would devote yourself to combining holy Names, still greater things would happen to you. And now, my son, admit that you are unable to bear not combining. Give half to this and half to that, that is, do combinations half the night, and permutations half the night.[13]
Contemporary with Abulafia, and not far away, Ramon Llull was born in Majorca in the thirteenth century. Llull was a Christian mystic and a Neoplatonist. After receiving a vision on a mountaintop in which he saw the "Dignities" of God revealed to him as elements in all creation, Llull devoted himself to developing a truly eccentric and original combinatorial system of letters and revolving wheels. What is called Llull's Art is a kind of self-contained logic. He devised the Art to prove systematically the reality of universal Christian truths and to serve his missionary purpose of converting Jews and Muslims by demonstrating these truths. The Art is enormously complex, but put simply, it employs letters of the alphabet as symbolic notation for Divine attributes; the letters are placed on revolving wheels and can then be mechanically combined with other data in order to solve problems. Llull believed his Art could be applied to all fields of knowledge and was therefore a truly universalist system.(14) In Llull's own words: "We have employed an alphabet in this art so that it can be used to make figures as well as to mix principles and rules for the purpose of investigating the truth" [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED].(15)
Llull's Art has often been described as a precursor of modern symbolic logic and the computer, "a prototype of an expert system."(16) It depends on a user, or "artista," who can mobilize the structure to apply it to specific questions. Werner Kunzel, a Berlin philosopher/computer scientist, has translated Llull's Ars Magna into a DOS program, which is available on the Internet.(17)
Llull's thought was enormously influential in the centuries to follow, especially in the Renaissance. Frances Yates says, "The European search for method ... began with Ramon Lull."(18) In the seventeenth century, Athanasius Kircher was singularly influenced by Llull and expanded the Ars Magna into his own Ars Magna Sciendi. Llull's influence continued to Rene Descartes and to Leibniz, the father of symbolic logic, who developed his own ars combinatoria. By this time, the purpose of ars combinatoria, in the examples I have found, was moving away from the mystical or universalist and toward systems for symbolic logic, semantic invention, or pure process and play. This shift seems qualitative, from the mystical to the formal.
