Agency of meaning
The Library of Babel is written in first person. Our narrator often mentions he is writing on a book, which (we can only assume) came from one of the hexagons in the titular, infinite library.
I attempted to make a facsimile of this by mixing Dada found imagery collages (such as Kurt Schwitters) and cursive journal entries contemplating the laws of nature that I saw at the British library, penned by the likes of Ada Lovelace, Leonardo DaVinci and Charles Darwin.
Jonathan Basile simulated an online library of babel which can generate every combination of the 29 symbols Borges describes (10 to the power of 5000 pages). I searched for the title “the library of babel” on the site and used the gibberish pages produced for the printed contents of the book our narrator is scrawling onto and annotating.
Inspired by geometric Moorish architecture I’d seen at Alhambra (which also inspired M.C. Escher’s seemingly infinite tessellations)I tried to make a nonsensical blueprint of the library using Borges descriptions. This inspired the use of cyanotypes for image making throughout the rest of this project.
Front cover
Destruction of books deemed nonsense by 'purifiers'.
Destruction of books deemed nonsense by 'purifiers'.
"The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms".
The cyanotypes produced were inspired by Biology and the golden ratio. I tessellated an IBM close-up of a molecule, took photos of the Wellcome Collection library of all base sequences in the human genome and generated bar codes to resemble Gel electrophoresis DNA bands.
Daniel Dennett appropriates the library of Babel as “The library of Mendel” to illustrate how- like in the protein base sequences in DNA - finding any book in the library that makes sense is highly improbable due to the sheer number of combinations and lack of order. Natural selection, however, has picked out the protein sequences that make sense which is more than can be said for the library of Babel’s librarians who succumb to Nihilism with the sheer disorder of it all.
The meaninglessness of the universe and how we make our own meaning by ascribing meaning to symbols and proxies, through spirituality and religion again ties into Dada.
Cyanotype of Bar and QR codes emulating DNA Gel Electrophoresis bars
An inquisitor searching the library for meaning.
I was further inspired by Rauschenberg’s illustrations of Dante’s inferno for illustrating the narrator’s existential crisis. Since everything that could ever be written is contained in the library, he describes the occupants as “phantoms”. This reflects the agency of meaning; the narrator’s words may be somewhere in the library, but they are not intended as a record of his subjective existence and expression of feeling.
Communication of meaning is the role of an illustrator and is perhaps why books in the crimson hexagon are described as “all-powerful, illustrated and magical” breaking the constant random structure of the library with the promise of meaning.
Illustrations for the Library of Babel posted on the Four Corners website
(https://www.fourcornersbooks.co.uk/articles/camberwell-familiars/)