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
