ESSAY By Sean Patrick Maylone

lit@sfbg.com

The rise of the hyperbook

In a Buenos Aires apartment, the narrator of Jorge Luis Borges's "The Book of Sand" flips through an infinite book he has obtained, quickly turning the pages but never finding the same page twice, nor an end or a beginning to the text. In reading this passage, you can't help but be reminded of hours of Internet research, of clicking through pages of ever shifting digital information.

After spending some time with the bewildering, illimitable book, Borges's character proposes destroying it with fire, but then he hesitates: "I feared the burning of an infinite book might likewise prove infinite and suffocate the planet with smoke."

Google's solution, when faced with the wealth of history's writings, was to organize it all. In a Herculean (or perhaps Aristotelian) move, the Mountain View firm, begun as a digital custodian of the Internet's information, is taking the first steps toward building an ultimate library by attempting to scan all the books in the world into its database. The feasibility of consolidating the written word is a new reality, but it has also long been a conceptual toy of Borges's; the Google project is prefigured in the Borges story "The Library of Babel," about a library composed of every possible combination of letters and words, with some texts containing no actual language, only random, nonsensical combinations of characters and punctuation.

The titles and natures of Borges's and Google's (remember the name Google refers to a googol, an astronomically large number) massive projects suggest, almost, an attempt to reform all language into one universal, cooperative dialogue, as it was said to have been in myth before the Tower of Babel debacle, before God had a tantrum and broke humanity into separate languages. Really, these libraries are the bibliophile's take on globalization.

The conceptual literary relics of Borges and Italo Calvino – infinite libraries, stories of corrupted encyclopedias and of forking multitudinous possible realities and of books that rewrite themselves – are serving as outlines for new forms of nonlinear and fluid works and writings. This new dynamic genre bears as much resemblance to the long-standing, static idea of writing as a free-verse poem does to a sonnet.

SARDÓN

Participants in Mariano Sardón's "Books of Sand" run their hands through bins of sand covered with glowing script via projectors in the ceiling. As their hands playfully stir the sand, the text appears to shimmer and fade away, revealing more text underneath; no matter how much they dig, the layers continue without end. Sardón, an interactive artist, a professor of electronic arts, and (like Borges) a native of Buenos Aires, made his "Books of Sand" in homage to the fabled relic in Borges's story; the computer-controlled projectors sense where the participants move and filter in content pulled off the Internet.

Working off the chaos of unorganized information and the tactile experience of running one's fingers through sand, Sardón's piece is not language with cogent narrative structure, but more of an experience that is orchestrated, the feeling of sorting through the slush pile of those famous million studious typewriter monkeys, trying desperately to find a copy of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 20" without so many spelling errors.

DRAGULESCU

The Romanian visual artist Alec Dragulescu's most recent works include a program that generates a new graphic novel documenting the US war effort in the Middle East every time it runs, and also a collection of visual algorithms built into intricate trees from Marxist buzzwords and corporate logos. Juggling the currency of modern entertainment and marketing media with an Adbusters sense of criticism, both works function by precisely borrowing from other sources, much like collage work.

Colorful Burger King and Absolut logos form the wash of color in Dragulescu's "Algorithmns of the Absurd," glowing against the black branches of words such as czar, communism, and terrifying.

"I have always been interested," Dragulescu writes on his Web site, "in juxtaposing the two main ideologies of our time and their impact on an individual level – part of it because I have experienced both.

"The tree shapes," he says of the elegant shapes that branch and twist at times, "are chosen because they are fundamental data structures in computing."

The blogosphere, which finds new writers – new bloggers, that is – in the hundreds of postings every day, whether a blog about a teenager's life or something more topic-specific, such as one of my personal favorites, BLDGBLOG, a blog on architectural conjecture and urban speculation. The interested reader now has access to intimate, unfiltered content.

Dragulescu draws from these firsthand perspectives for one of his works.

A hyperbook he created, "What I Did Last Summer," shows animation frames of soldiers, taken from a video game, making their way across the screen, at every step giving a line of a dialogue taken from one of two blogs, parody-labeled the "Blue" and "Red" teams. Choose the blue team and follow the path of the My War Blog writer, Colby Buzzell, a US soldier reporting firsthand on his experience in Iraq; choose the red team and the "Baghdad Blogger," Raed Jarrar, tells of living inside an invaded country. As each character and line of dialogue appears, it remains on the screen as more characters and dialogue pop up, creating a hall-of-mirrors, "Nude Descending a Staircase with M-16" display of time and motion. Each time the reader plays through the entry, images and highlighted sentences change. A work like "What I Did Last Summer" can update itself; what it loses in familiarity, it gains in continued novelty. I have just read the piece as the Red Team, in which Jarrar tells of tank mines exploding on the city streets:

The second exploded in Ghazalia district killing a girl and injuring her mother. Now this second mine was laid on the street after the American check point left that same street and the people there are saying that the mine was left by the Americans, which is complete bullshit.

The words complete bullshit appear twice, and in a larger font than the rest, emphasizing his vitriolic exasperation.

. . .

The notion of self-generating pieces, as they are realized by those who can apply poetics in programming languages, is interesting; there might be stories that, having already left their creators, tell themselves in a new way at every turn. Possibly the spirit of an artist's voice, its frequency of cracking and the color of its metaphors, can be caught and held within the binding of the unbound hyperbook. Each time one returns to the work, the same sensations flow without redundancy, like a continuous spring. In this way, minds like that of blind, humble, librarians named Jorge Luis Borges (the one we know and the ones we may still know) can leave behind more vibrant ghosts to speak to us.

marianosardon.com.ar www.sq.ro bldgblog.blogspot.com cbftw.blogspot.com dear_raed.blogspot.com