There is a website right now that contains a photo of your funeral. It also contains a
picture of the day you were born. It contains an image of every piece of art that currently exists,
every piece of art that has ever been lost, and every piece of art that could ever be made. It
contains every frame of a theoretical low resolution movie of the universe
from the beginning of time to the end, from every conceivable angle. And then
it contains that movie of the universe with a permanent blue pixel in the corner of the frame.
In fact it contains every image that could ever exist. It’s called the Babel Image
Archives. On this website is an algorithm that creates randomized fields of pixels in
a 640 by 416 pixel canvas using 4096 different colors. The archive contains 4096 to the 266240
unique images. You can upload any image you have on your computer and get a slightly posterized
version of it in return with a string of numbers that corresponds to its location in the archive.
Or if you have 10 to the 961748 years on hand you can click on the universal slide
show and simply wait for your image to appear. This web page is actually a different section in
another more famous website called the Library of Babel, which is based on the short story by
Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine writer who often grappled with the idea of infinity. In the story,
The Library of Babel is a seemingly infinite construction of hexagonal walls containing shelves
upon shelves of books filled with every possible combination of characters that could be fit in 410
pages. It contains everything that could ever be written, works of Shakespeare, the complete
history of the world, the cures to diseases we don’t even know exist yet, a description of your
death as it will occur as well as many many false descriptions of your death. Since there
is no filter for meaning, as you can imagine, the library is overwhelmingly filled with gibberish.
There is another less mystical, version of this concept out there that you have probably heard
of before; the infinite monkey theorem. If you haven’t, the theorem states that if you have a
set of monkeys, or really just one monkey randomly hitting keys on a typewriter for
an infinite amount of time it will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works
of Shakespeare. It will also almost surely type every piece of text that could ever be written.
The problem is that the probability of even enough monkeys filling up the entire observable universe
typing away for a period of time hundreds of thousands of orders of magnitude longer than
the age of the universe, successfully typing the complete works of Shakespeare is so low
it might as well be zero even though it technically isn’t. Despite this some have
attempted this experiment with many fundamental constraints. Someone named Jesse Anderson got
a bunch of virtual monkeys or as we usually call them, computer programs, to spit out sequences of
text nine characters long and matched them to all the works of Shakespeare, which they eventually
completed. Real monkeys pose a different challenge as I imagine that the simple shape of the keyboard
would cause uneven distributions of which keys are hit, also...the monkeys would probably hit
a few keys over and over again, get bored, and then piss on the machine, which is exactly what
happened when monkeys at a zoo were given a computer by researchers at Plymouth University.
The Babel Image archives is just another result of randomization with enough units to randomize,
although it is not as artfully constructed as Jorge Borges’s library or the library of babel
website I find it appropriate for this digital age. One could turn it into a museum of babel,
with room upon room filled with same sized images. But to me it’s more like a singular
always changing canvas, The Canvas of Babel, that if you are impossibly lucky could reveal
to you the most meaningful images of your life. It could reveal the most powerful work of art you
have ever seen. It could reveal the blueprints for a spaceship that travels faster than lightspeed.
You could find images of yourself looking at yourself looking at every image in the
image archives. But you will never find anything like that, you will just find endless pictures
of noise. The Babel Image Archives actually makes the Library of Babel seem small in comparison.
The Library of Babel contains 10^4677 books, there are around 10^80 atoms in the universe,
you could fit the universe inside the library of babel multiple and when I say multiple I mean an
astronomically huge amount of times. The babel image archives contain 10^961755 images. You
could fit the Library of Babel inside the babel image archives multiple times. Someone has created
something that is so out of grasp in terms of hugeness that if you somehow unzipped these
libraries it seems like they would simply crash the universe. Balloon it’s size to a point it
completely collapses. All of this contained in an algorithm you can access from a website programmed
by one Jonathan Basile. The Canvas of Babel nor the Library of Babel can fit inside this universe.
I once saw someone in a post say something like “we should search for the secret to immortality
I know the chances are slim but it’s worth a shot” and I just wanted to reach through the
screen grab them by their shirt collar and say to them IDIOT! YOUR ARROGANCE IS YOUR DOWNFALL you
cannot even conceive the NUMBER we are speaking of!” To that person I’m sorry for the harsh words,
let me set you down,--but it’s true. You will not find the secret to immortality on this
website in your lifetime. You would be extremely lucky to find even a single coherent sentence.
An image with a concentration of pixels that even approaches looking deliberately made.
And yet I share that arrogance too. Sometimes I think to myself I should mobilize a million people
to watch their computers running the Universal Slideshow just to find something interesting even
just a small group of pixels of the same color something that isn’t pure random noise. You can
still play around with these websites despite the fruitlessness of searching for anything in them.
It’s actually possible to produce images with the library of babel such as creating all the
black and white frames in text to that “Bad Apple” video. Or you could simply upload the pages from
the library of babel onto the babel image archives demonstrating one does indeed fit inside the
other. I wonder if there could be an Audio Library of Babel, a library full of every arrangement of
bits of sound to produce every piece of audio that could be made...or even simpler. Could
one arrange every possible note to produce every possible song, every possible melody? Well that’s
exactly what Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin did when they created a computer program to generate all 8
note melodies of the C scale, the area where most popular music resides, that have ever existed and
could ever exist, which comes out to be just a measly 68 billion. The project was the result
of trying to prove a point, to provide a counter argument in response to a series of deeply moronic
court cases on supposed “copyright violations” concerning melodies that one artist “plagiarized”
from another. In the case of George Harrison, the claim was that one artist could “subconsciously
plagiarize” the melody of a previous artist without consciously remembering and stealing that
work. Anyone who knows a thing or two about music knows this is a dangerous precedent to set because
the amount of 8 note melodies that can be made are finite, in fact much smaller than the still finite
but much much larger library of babel. These three libraries combined house basically every
piece of creative work a human being could make, naturally it questions the nature of originality.
If you ever worry that the story or movie you’re planning out isn’t original enough, you’re right,
it literally already exists...somewhere. There is part of me that wishes someone creates an
algorithm to search for meaning and discards everything that is pure gibberish. Just like
in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, where a group of “Purifiers” would go around and condemn
entire walls of books, throwing them down the infinite shaft, getting rid of everything they
deemed “worthless.” But how does one construct a machine to look for meaning? What if there is
a text that uses very little real words but is nonetheless extremely moving somehow? How about
all the words that haven’t been invented yet? What about abstract artworks? What about works like
those of Mark Rothko, who some will argue cannot be fully appreciated in a simple picture? And in
all that machine sorted sludge of meaning...how do you find the truth in a sea of lies?
Sorting algorithms are currently a trendy topic on the internet. You may have seen some of the
many oddly mesmerizing and musically beeping videos that try to visualize the different
ways a computer can sort different elements into an ordered list. There’s heap sort, quick sort,
bubble sort, all with the same goal---to take a bunch of random elements and order them. And
then there’s Bogo sort, easily the most popular sorting algorithm to consumers of these videos,
not because it’s any good, actually quite the opposite, because it is the worst most useless
sorting algorithm. It’s something of a joke. While “bubble sort” is considered the generic “bad”
algorithm because it is very inefficient, Bogo sort is as inefficient as someone could possibly
get. Bogo sort takes whatever elements you give it, reshuffles them randomly, checks them,
and if they aren’t ordered---reshuffles them again until they are ordered. It’s kind of like someone
in the library of babel going to a random shelf, picking up a book and expecting to find Hamlet.
The interesting thing as many have pointed out is that Bogo sort is actually the fastest
sorting algorithm of them all…if you are astronomically lucky. It could shuffle it
perfectly on it’s first try. It’s time to complete its sort is 0 to infinity. The Quantum Bogosort
is even more guaranteed. It generates all possible permutations in every universe and simply destroys
every universe except for the one it is sorted in. Bogosort has a certain allure, people treat it as
if it were a person. Some users have uploaded ludicrously long videos and commenters point
out timestamps where Bogo sort gets so close but ultimately fails. There’s this psychological itch
that still remains with all of these impossible odds. That maybe bogosort will work instantly
this one time that the libraries will reveal something to me because I’m special in some way
and...well the odds aren’t technically zero. It’s the same mentality that makes the lottery work.
The great thing about art is that I rarely feel like someone is simply filling in some
slot in some universal list, as if we were just animals generating permutation after permutation
of every work of art that could be made until we happen upon the “ultimate artwork.” Only in
truly soulless art like NFT collections where it really does seem like someone is going through and
finding what animal hasn’t been paired with some trait and making that collection just to make it,
just to fill in that slot to squeeze out that last penny, do I feel this machine-like cynicism. Even
quite bad works of art, those with even a modicum of vision, have to map onto a loose structure
of meaning. Meaning makes art. The reality is that The Canvas of Babel, The Library of Babel,
and The Audio Library of Babel, all contain everything that could ever be written, imagined,
or heard but you will never find anything of use. You simply can’t. They’re about
as useful in finding something of meaning as saying “the meaning of life exists somewhere”.
The only way you find meaningful art in these libraries is by making it yourself.