The Aleph (click to view)

This is an interactive Flash applet inspired by Google, information theory, and Jorge Luis Borges' short story, The Aleph. Google states that its mission is to "organize the world's information." How much information is this? In The Aleph, Borges addresses this issue as he sees the world continuing to rush on after his friend Beatriz's death and later as he investigates a point in space that contains all other points within it. He realizes that his limited nature prevents him from understanding everything.

The piece generates text character by character, making sure that each new added character is preceded in the text of The Aleph by a variable number of characters that were generated before it. As this number is shortened, the generated text becomes less and less readable while maintaining certain statistical properties that were present in the original work. In this way the piece uses the information contained within The Aleph to create a never-ending stream of new information. An infinite amount of information "exists" within a single short story.

The viewer can interact with this piece in two ways. First, when the viewer highlights a generated "word" with the mouse (e.g. "foremonstrange"), the word is replaced by the closest word to it that actually occurs in The Aleph (in this case "remonstrance"). Second, when the viewer clicks on a word, that word is replaced by its nearest match in the story and the piece is "reset" so that the generated text temporarily makes sense again. In these two ways the viewer can try (but ultimately fail) to make sense of the infinite stream of information passing by on the screen.