Category: Writings

In “the Library of Babel” the author Jorge Luis Borges (1998) illustrates an infinite unordered universe and refers to it as “the library”. In “the library”, the content of the books are composed with variations of 23 letters, in random order. Therefore, every possible permutation of letters is accessible in one of the books in “the library”, only awaiting its discovery.

The infinite possibilities illustrated in the story creates multi-dimensional perspectives to the readers to immerse themselves into this infinite library. I want to use my design to visualize and replicate this abstract environment and feeling of infinite and orderly unordered which Luis Borges illustrated in his story through classification and resorting. The alphabet letters in small font size, standing against a darkened background, are designed to bring a mysterious, enigmatic feeling and an imaginative space for the viewers to discover the infinite unordered library.

Borges (1998) wrote before the start of the story “by this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters”, thus I took this prologue as my inspiration, which I pulled out all the nouns from the text and place them in alphabetic order, and combined it with the library search function created this index. By extracting nouns from the text, it allows me to break down the text and get a wide picture of the story through a glance as nouns are the first and focal building squares of language. The index can also lead audiences to explore the vagueness and mysteriousness of the metaphor presented in the story, by encoding and decoding it, rather than passive reception. 

Selecting unorderly from and ordered index:

Centered around the main idea of the story that everything is unordered, I want liberation from the traditional way of reading a written text which has to be from the start to end. My design intent is to allow readers entering into the text through anywhere along the alphabetical index. Their selections of the words can be random just like what Jorge Luis Borges illustrated in the story.

Reference:

Borges, J.L. (1998). “The Library of Babel”, Collected fictions. New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Viking, pp. 112-118.

The space I chose to investigate is the Gasholder Park located in King’s Cross. This is a place where I walk pass by almost every single day and the unique architecture style always fascinates me. Through this project I wish to investigate the purpose of this space and how people interact with the space in different time of the day.

It has been illustrated in detail that two blind people’s actions and appearances in the Rue Linné (Georges, Perec, 1974). In my project, I was to observe people in the Gasholder park like what Perec was illustrating in his writing. During my investigation, I was sitting in the corner of the park, and note down people who entering the park, their route, appearances, actions, positions, genders, and approximate ages. I then summarized the information into symbols and graphs. It’s interesting that I found both my investigation and Perec’s writing are consists of both objective facts (for example, we both recorded the target person’s actions and appearances) and subjective observation (in this case me and Perec both record /wrote about the approximate age of the person through his/her appearances and the person’s emotion/feeling through his/her actions). As a result, I believe the objective facts can reflect subjective observations. However, if I were to continue this project, I would to proof or deny my subjective observations by talking to my target people.

Johanna Drucker (2014, cited in Designing graphic interpretation) states that Imagining new intellectual forms of interpretation also means designing and sustaining the spaces that structure interpretive act. It relates to my investigation of the Gasholder Park in a way that it’s theme of suggesting a new way of using graphic to interpreting the intellectual forms. In my investigation, I visualized people in the park with symbols and colors to categorize them and investigate their actions and emotions. It also resonates with what Drucker (2014, p. 181) states “Innovative graphic armatures will extend our capacities to create associative arguments in digital space, creating the support for extensive interpretative activities among textual and visual artifacts.” By using graphic interpretation, I was able to spot the different interaction people made with the space during different time of the day clearer and with more logic.

Reference List:

1. Perec, G. (1974) ‘The Street’, ‘The Neighborhood’ and ‘The Town’, in Species of Spaces and Other Places. pp. 46-67.
2. Drucker, J. (2014) ‘Designing graphic interpretation’, in Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 180-192.