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Soul Scroll

The prayer machine on display at CADAF art fair.

Technical Specs Below

Due to the shortage of men of the priesthood the Council has invented the Soul Scroll. Due to our limited knowledge of our God we send out the prayer on as many sensory and spiritual channels as possible in order to thwart the evil one. This enables women to submit requests for approved prayers and supplications authored by the most learned and holy men of the Republic. At times you may receive a prayer generated by an artificial intelligence model that was trained by Elder John and approved by proxy. Find out more at History of Soul Scroll

For those new to this concept, when payment is made to the blockchain contract the machine will select a prayer. It will create an on-chain NFT, sending it to your wallet. It will print the prayer, read it out loud and inscribe it on to the blockchain. Optionally it may also live stream the performing of the prayer reading. The Prayer Contract The prayer is actually put into the NFT by Ethernet nodes all over the world so actually the prayer is compose in many places at once.

(Soul Scroll, you might have called it a Holy Roller, is designed to act as a proxy for women to pray approved prayers of the Republic of Gilead out loud. Prayers generated may be offensive but they are based on prayers from The Handmaid’s Tale and religious communities I have studied and participated in.) You can see the prayers that have been read for others on OpenSea.

Breezy Art

Tech Specs

The Soul Scroll at its heart is a Solidity smart contract that runs on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It is a custom contract written by the artists and extends the OpenZeppelin NFT and royalty contracts. Find it at https://etherscan.io/address/0xd44e37d09243a008ee1ae7838459d7faad9d250c . By running on EVM the prayer is actually manifested in many places at once in a digital space. Which brings up a question: Does God hear and see what is on the blockchain? But just in case the prayer will be printed and spoken out just to make sure God knows about it.

On Chain

Many of the functions have been renamed to correspond with the artistic intent of the contract. OrderPrayer calls the minting. It has been configured to create an on-chain NFT using an SVG file that programmatically is populated from a list of prayers. When rendered the output looks like the sample below.

After the NFT is minted a physical machine composed of a Raspberry Pi, a thermal printer, speakers and a spool for the scroll of paper reads the blockchain via the Alchemy api. It reads the description and other data on the metadata of the NFT to print the prayer and read it out loud the number of times that the customer has ordered it to be read.

There is an interface created with React that allows a supplicant to order the prayer and based on the price the number of times it is read can be increased. This would make the NFT more rare based on the number of times it is read. In theory the more prayers read the more likely God will listen.

The Financial Scheme

The contract also holds special financial and spiritual functions. There is an allow list of elders called Sons of Jacob. So addSonOfJacob allows the contract owner to add new members. Once a member they must pay the initiation fee. (payInitiation) When this is accomplished they are allowed to write new prayers into the contract. When their prayer is purchased and read they will receive 75% of the proceeds.

In addition there are methods to renounce the office and one for excommunication.

The Installation

The main aesthetic focal point is the aluminum triangle with The Eye with wings. It is a combination of the eye of Horus and the wings of Isis. Again based on the book which describes and eye with wings as the symbol of the Republic.

Also included is a screen that displays the image of the NFT after it is minted and an iPhone that is streaming the reading to all of the internet.