GOFMAN

Igor Gofman is an automation engineer and programmer from Kherson. From 2008 to 2011 he kept a blog in which he broke the world into syllables, translated his neighbours’ surnames from Hebrew, and assembled them into a map of the universe. He called it semantic analysis across four languages. To him the world was a staged show, the people closest to him were actors, and the wall of his apartment was a Wailing Wall, transparent from the other side. The goal stated on his résumé: building the new Temple.

78 posts. Under each one: “No comments.”

A decade later his videos became one of the most enduring phenomena of the Russian-speaking internet. Around a man who never sought an audience grew a community of thousands of strangers who speak his language. They quote his phrases like passwords, write in his name, extend his mythology and train neural networks to speak in his voice. A man who spent his life suspecting he was watched by actors finally got them.

GOFMAN explores this mechanism: how the internet builds a community around someone else’s inner speech, and how that speech, once public, stops belonging to one person.

The project is structured after a page of the Talmud, which Gofman himself invoked when comparing his writing to the Mishnah and Gemara: the text at the centre, layers of commentary around it.

The red work is the Mishnah. A transcript of his speech, parsed and broken down into data. The voices inside.

The blue work is the Gemara. The mass of comments beneath his videos. The voices outside: viewers who became co-authors.

Both works exist as posters and as video art. Side by side, they erase the line between a voice in the head and a voice in the feed.

Gofman parsed the world by hand. We parse the voices in his head.

Technologies: data parsing, data art, neural networks, manual finishing.