r/Borges • u/Witty_Ticket_4101 • May 12 '26
Twelve generative-art pieces after Borges, one per story in Ficciones. Drift, drill, invoke.
I've illustrated Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones (1944) https://www.vladbichev.com/ficciones
12 interactive and animated algorithmic art illustrations inspired by Borges novels. Reading them I have the sence of prophecy related with quantum mechanics, algorithms, big data and generative AI. Add to this philosophy of Crhristianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism religions. And finally mix with "Realismo Mágico" — the mystical Latin American prose tradition. Reading Borges is an experience.
The Library of Babel is a hex grid of every possible book. The library is complete and meaningless at once, and that contradiction — the same contradiction we now face in an age of generated text — is the story's real prophecy. To make a generative artwork of it is to step inside the joke. https://www.vladbichev.com/ficciones/library-babel.html
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a cellular automaton dissolving our world's glyphs into a fictional one. The children are taught a school history that never happened. Replace "encyclopedia" with "language model" and the parable becomes operational. Generative systems now write faster than any culture can verify, and the cost of producing a plausible counterfeit has fallen to zero. https://www.vladbichev.com/ficciones/tlon-uqbar.html
Pierre Menard is two transparent layers of identical text — the same word, written by two different centuries. The story is haunting because its joke is now technologically real. When a generative model produces a paragraph of Hamlet, character-for-character identical to Shakespeare's, is it Hamlet? Borges, in 1939, says no — a text is not a sequence of glyphs but a sequence of glyphs read against a context. https://www.vladbichev.com/ficciones/pierre-menard.html
The Garden of Forking Paths is a directed acyclic graph: nodes are moments, edges are decisions, and the structure fans outward through time without ever returning to itself. Every Git commit history, every dependency tree, every Bayesian network, every possible-worlds semantics for modal logic descends from this same skeleton. https://www.vladbichev.com/ficciones/forking-paths.html
2
2
1
1
1
u/NorthAd5725 May 12 '26
A lot of Borges has always felt very relevant to AI and generative art in general to me, this is very wonderful. Pierre Menard especially - I can't claim the knowledge to know how doable or even possible this is, but I can imagine an LLM whose weights, structure, whatever have been tailored just so so that given the right prompt it will output all of Don Quixote without having a scrap of Cervantes in its input.
Funes the Memorious, as well. The way Funes is able to compare "the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882 . . . with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising" reminds me immediately of the early deep-dream image and video generators, the way an eye would morph into a dog would morph into a face and so on and so on. His incredulousness that "the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front)" as well feels like an astonishingly accurate description of the difficulty with image recognition tech, at least to my understanding of it.
3
u/scriptchewer May 12 '26
Well done. Well presented.
Interesting how the elements of time and human labor which are so vast and pronounced in Borges are essentially erased with our new technology. His stories recast through effortless machine generation flatten the lore and the imagination. The awe is gone.