Anti-Semitic Message Hidden in Spillover II?

Is there an anti-Semitic work of art at the shores of Lake Michigan, as claimed by Matt Sweetwood in http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/how-i-discovered-hate-in-plain-sight-on-a-popular-sculpture-wat/? If so, does it have to be removed or even scrapped?

Does Jaume Plensa have to be condemned for being anti-Semitic?

Let us get the facts straight. In “Spillover II” Jaume Plensa hid, according to Matt Sweetwood, a number of words: FRY, BAD, JEW, CHEAP and DEAD. The statue is in fact a sheet made up of capital letters draped in the form of the outline of a human body, from the waist rising from the ground. There are thousands of letters in the statue. These letters seem to be placed at random, most of the time not even in line with each other, causing the literate brain to interpret the form in combination with a chaos of letters as a conflict of messages: chaos versus order. Any hidden message would corrupt the intended chaos in the letters. This leads us to the question: is there a reasonable chance of unintentionally recognizable words occurring?

At a rough estimate I come to a letter sheet of about 26*26 letters (a very rough estimate, the height of the statues is about 35 letters, but there are many spaces so I decided to reduce the number to 26), with which the imaginary bust figure has been draped. On such a sheet one out 26 letters will be for example an E. the chance of a letter E being preceded by a J is 1/26, the chance of a letter E being followed by a W is 1/26, the chance of a letter E both being preceded by a letter J and followed by a letter W is 1/26*26=1/676. In the whole sheet the chance of a letter E occurring preceded by an J and followed by a W is 26*1/26*26=1/26, about 4%. Jaume Plensa made tens of sculptures like this, so the chance of the three letter combination JEW occurring in one of his sculptures is quite high.

The exact chance can be calculated by calculating the negative, the chance of an E not being preceded by a J and also not being followed by a W is 25/26*25/26=625/676. The chance of JEW not occurring in 10 statues is 25²⁰/26²⁰=0.4564, almost 1 in 2, with 15 statues the chance becomes 25³⁰/26³⁰=0.3083, so the chance of the word JEW occurring at least once is almost 7 out of 10! We might state: the chance of the letter combination “JEW” unintentionally not occurring is much lower than the opposite.

Is there a reasonable chance of the word “JEW” occurring in combination with a meaningful letter combination? I limited myself to three letter combinations. On http://www.yak.net/kablooey/scrabble/3letterwords.html (quite handy for Scrabble players) I found 1012 three letter words, i.e. the chance A of a three letter combination being a word is 1012/26*26*26= 0.057579, about 1 in 17.4. The problem in a sheet however is that people tend to recognize words horizontally to the right or vertically downwards. That means that every letter can be part of 6 words (x.., .x., ..x, and the same vertically)., so the chance C of a letter being part of a word in the sheet is 6*A. The conclusion has to be that the chance of a letter in the sheet being part of a three letter word is 0.3455, over 1 in 3. For someone looking for three letter words that can be used in Scrabble the search will be easy: on average every third letter will be part of a useful three letter word.

Now we are going to look for three letter words in the direct neighborhood of the accidentally occurring “JEW”. Roughly we can look for 8 places (again this is an approximation, in the used ‘sheet” are so many spaces that the actual number of 12 three letter combinations surrounding a three letter word had to be reduced, I chose for the number 8): left-high, left, left-below, above-middle, below-middle, right-above, right and right-below. In all the cases we can expect the three letter word to be recognized as a word that can be combined with “JEW”. Again we have to start looking for the chances of those words not occurring, (1-(1012/26³))⁸=0.6222. the chance of a three letter word being found in combination with the three letter word “JEW” is 1-0.6222=0.3778, about 3 in 8.

My conclusion:

·         There is a significant chance of the word “JEW” unintentionally occurring in alphabet sculptures.

·         When the word “JEW” unintentionally occurs the chance of it being (again unintentionally) combined with another three letter word is about 3 in 8.

·         The chance of the combination of words being interpreted “in malam parten” can not be calculated, it I a case of personal interpretation.

·         We can not possibly conclude to “guilt beyond reasonable doubt” to the hate crimeic Message in  of which Jaume Plensa has been accused.

I choose to let the facts speak for themselves. If Jaume Plensa had a history of anti-Semitic, anti-Zionistic or anti-Israel affiliation the doubts about the unintentionality of the described word combinations might be raised. If Jaume Plensa had a history of hiding messages in his alphabet sculptures the bad intention with the mentioned words in the Shorewood sculpture might be likely. In juridical terms: Jaume Plensa can not be suspected of having a criminal history nor of having a motive for the crime. Without these to the intentionality can not be suspected, so we have to assume that this was a case of chance playing a game with our minds.

My proposal would be to accept that this has occurred unintentionally. However, now the question had been raised the debate will continue, distracting people from the original intention of the statue. The solution might be found in an easy quick-fix, removing the bottom line of the letter E, thus leaving a meaningless letter combination “JFW”. In combination with FRY, BAD, CHEAP and DEAD this yields no meaningful messages. The only thing that it leaves is a nice puzzle for kids to search as many existing words they can in the sculpture. While the kids are having a nice time playing their game adults can enjoy the cultural stimulation of Jaume Plensa’s inspiring art work.