Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library of Babel, this work translates the story’s central conceit into a live computational form. Borges imagines a library that contains every possible combination of letters, punctuation, and space, and therefore every possible text: all literature, all speech, all histories, all futures, all errors, and all lies.

The piece performs this logic as an autonomous internet-based program that continuously enumerates textual permutations. What appears on screen is a fleeting fragment of an immeasurable combinatorial universe. Viewers contribute directly to the work: the time they spend with it is accumulated and translated into additional computational steps, so that collective attention becomes part of the mechanism that drives the library forward.

Internet-based
2006 / ongoing
First exhibited in Bits and Pieces (two-person show with Feng Mengbo), University of North Texas Art Gallery, Denton, US