La Biblioteca de Babel is an academic project developed as final submission for the Processing. Three weekends. workshop taught by Frieder Nake and Stefan Kreitmayer at Universität Bremen, Winter term 2009/10. The initial frame of choice for project topics was “Lines and Circles. In Color Motion”. Taking Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Library of Babel as initial reference, this project investigates the relationship between language and meaning, represented metaphorically through code.
A constant concern with language and meaning permeates The Library of Babel’s storyline; the character’s obsession with deciphering, understanding and assigning meaning to his surroundings is a core element of the plot. The initial idea for this project was to transpose these concerns into a program that would react to the observer’s attitude towards the machine. A set of characters combine, recombine and change organically, slowly building a map of an imaginary language’s structure; the detection of an intruder causes the characters to disperse and disappear. The aim of the program is to hide itself from the viewer, so as not to be deciphered or understood. The system will keep running and adding particles to the point of self destruction.
More about the development and structure of the program here.
Dowload the source code.
Babel was part of the Tweak festival exhibition in Limerick, Ireland, between September 17th and September 24th, 2010.
photo by www.tweak.ie
v.0.8: visible particle path
v.0.9: final version
v.0.9 after 1 hour of activity