Hildegarde Visions “0”

Before becoming an artist, Roman Verostko spent years living as a Benedictine monk. The ritual practices of monastic life deeply influenced his later art, inspiring the meditative, algorithmic precision, and contemplative aesthetics of his pioneering generative compositions. This work’s title references Hildegarde of Bingen (1098–1179), a medieval theologian and mystic who organized her major prophetic work, Scivias, around 26 visions, divided in three parts. Verostko’s machine-drawn “visions” similarly invite meditation through a series of improvisational arrays, laid out in grid formation.

Verostko used his own Hodos software written with Basic and Digital Microprocessor/Plotting Language (DM/PL) to produce a series of formal variations that unfold in response to a given algorithm. A pen plotter machine fitted with up to fourteen colors drew the designs held within each rectangular boundary, proceeding in sequence according to the artist’s coded instructions. While forms generated by the same parent code necessarily have common characteristics, each iteration retains a unique identity. The forms do not represent objects in the world; rather, they are realities in and of themselves, visual traces of the coded procedures by which they were generated. Verostko intended such images to serve as “… icons, illuminating the mysterious nature of code, the procedures underlying the shape of our evolving selves.”