Excerpts from the Library of Babel
For the past several years I have been collecting used copies of books that contain Jorge Luis Borge's short story "The Library of Babel." This is a story about a library of infinite knowledge - a library so large and comprehensive that it contains a copy of every book ever written, every book that could be written - every possible combination of letters and numbers and languages. The library is so vast that it even includes books that will be written in the future, books started but never finished, or even books that have only ever been imagined.
But what such a library could never include is the way in which a book changes by being read - the ways that the touch of the reader interacts with, and influences, the text itself.
The Libary of Babel: Book 03, Pages 51-2 (detail)
Excerpts from the Library of Babel is conceived as a reversal of Borges' story: not the archive that contains every possible book, but rather a collection of just one - Borges' own - the book in which the story of the book is most fatefully told. The idea behind the exhibition is to re-tell Borges' story multiple times, taking numerous copies of the text and finding within them the history that is particular to each individual book - the stories left by the readers themselves. In order to do so, I use a process called Kirlian photography, an imaging technique that uses electricity instead of light to generate its pictures, and can therefore reveal parts of this hidden history of the book. Any mark on the text that effects the conductivity of the electrical current should make a difference to the way the image appears - fingerprints, marks or underlines, coffee stains or other signs of wear and tear left by the owners and readers of the story.
Excerpts from the Library of Babel is conceived as an ongoing project, that will continue to grow as I collect additional copies of Borges' book.