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Edited by Suzanne Kite

Introduction by Martin Plot

Thanks to Charles Gaines

Press: Rachel Kennedy

Cover: David Chathaswww.davidchathas.com

IntroductionMartín Plot

In “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” Borges begins, in a quite characteristic manner, by introducing uncertain-ties into the very heart of the narrators’ perspective:

Details,rectifications,adjustmentsarelacking;therearezonesofthestorynotyetrevealedtome;today,January 3rd, 1944, I seem to see it as follows: Theactiontakesplaceinanoppressedandtenaciouscountry:Poland,Ireland,theVenetianRepublic,someSouth AmericanorBalkanstate...Letussay(fornarrativeconvenience)Ireland;letussayin1824.Thenarrator’sname isRyan;heisthegreat-grandsonoftheyoung,theheroic,thebeautiful,theassassinatedFergusKilpatrick.1

BorgestellsusthatRyandecidedtowritehisgreat-grandfather’sbiographyandthusconductedacarefulhistorio-graphicalinvestigation.Itisduringthisinquirythatourcharacteridentifiesacertain“cyclicnature”totheevents,combiningandrepeatingtraces“ofremoteregions,ofremoteages.”Andthemostnoticeableoftheserecurrencesrevealed“thattheofficerswhoexaminedthehero’sbodyfoundasealedletterinwhichhewaswarnedoftheriskofattendingthetheatrethatevening;likewiseJuliusCaesar.”Again,asoftenhappensinBorges,thecharacterthenengagesinacomplexmetaphysicalorevenmythicalelaboration,onlytolaterbeenprovenwrongbytheall-too-human intertwining intricacies of empirical reality and other people’s agency:

[Theparallelisms]betweenthestoryofCaesarandthestoryofanIrishconspiratorleadRyantosupposethe existenceofasecretformoftime,apatternofrepeatedlines.Hethinksofthedecimalhistoryconceivedby Condorcet,ofthemorphologiesproposedbyHegel,SpenglerandVico,ofHesiod’smen,whodegeneratefrom goldtoiron.Hethinksofthetransmigrationofsouls.[...]Heisrescuedfromthesecircularlabyrinthsbyacurious finding,afindingwhichthensinkshimintoother,moreinextricableandheterogeneouslabyrinth:certainwords utteredbyabeggarwhospokewithFergusKilpatrickthedayofhisdeathwereprefiguredbyShakespeareinthe tragedyMacbeth.Thathistoryshouldhavecopiedhistorywasalreadysufficientlyastonishing;thathistoryshould copyliteraturewasinconceivable...

Asitturnsout,Ryanfinallydiscoversthatthehistoricaltruthofwhathadhappenedtohisgreat-grandfatherwaspolitical,notmetaphysical.Kilpatrick’smurderhadindeedtakenplaceinatheatre,butinrealityitwastheentireeventthathadbeenarepresentation:Kilpatrick’sfellowmilitantsinthestruggleforIrishindependencehadfoundhimtobeatraitor,butsincehisexecution—andthustherevelationofhisinfamy—wouldhavebeendevastatingtotheircause,theydecidedtodisguisethepunishmentasanEnglishcrime.Borges’centralinterrogationinthestory is evident: What should be given primacy to, the revelation of the moral indignity of the traitor’s deeds or the politicalappearanceofthehero’smartyrdom?Confrontedwiththedilemmaofexecutingthetraitorormourning

the hero, the militants chose the latter: a political no-brainer. Borges anticipated us, however, that the political labyrinth would be even more inextricable and heterogeneous than the metaphysical one, and concludes the story, as if talking about a fiction piece—and he of course was—with the following lines “In Nolan’s work, the passages imitated from Shakespeare are the least dramatic; Ryan suspects that the author interpolated them so that in the future someone might hit upon the truth. He understands that he too forms part of Nolan’s plot... After a series of tenacious hesitations, he resolves to keep his discovery silent. He publishes a book dedicated to the hero’s glory; this too, perhaps, was foreseen.”

Nolan’s original decision, the one made under the compelling urgency of events, gave primacy to the political over the moral—or better put, found a way of making (political) virtue out of (moral) necessity. Ryan’s dilemma, on the other hand, was fundamentally different—or was it? The dilemma was, rather, more “heterogeneous”: it added to the original dilemma, which of course remained valid, a new one of truth vs. politics—which was of course already present in the first decision, only that their comparative weight now got reversed. For Ryan, the meaning of the political appearance of Kilpatrick the revolutionary hero prevailed this second time not only over the moral indig-nity of his treason but also over the historical truth of having unveiled it over a century later. The story should not of course be read, in its turn, morally: Borges is not telling us that morality and (historical) truth do not matter or, even less so, that Nolan and Ryan choices are his. What Borges is doing is interrogating the meaning of the politi-cal, and in doing so he identifies it as being aesthetico-political.

Borges is for very good reasons regarded as a fundamentally philosophical writer. Those reasons, however, are not based on the assumption that to practice philosophy is to offer solutions to questions regarding the human condi-tion or some other metaphysical perplexities. Neither in his poems and short stories nor in his non-fiction essays Borges offers solutions or morals to the problems of aesthetic form, political coexistence, or epistemological inqui-ry. What Borges offers are interrogations. Argentine literary historian and cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo says in her description of what she calls Borges’ philosophical narrative situations (or presentations,) that “Borges’ stories are the narrative mise-en-scene of a question which is not posed overtly but which is presented, in the fiction, through the development of a plot.” No definitive answer to the question is, of course, offered in these philosophical narra-tive situations. “Borges,” she continues, “created a type of fiction in which ideas are not discussed through the char-acters, nor presented to the reader for consideration over and above the enjoyment of an unfolding narrative plot. On the contrary, ideas are the very stuff of the plot, and they shape it from the inside.”2 Borges’ reflections on phil-osophical topics indeed never appear—in his fictions and poems, but also often neither in his non-fiction essays—as Borges’ own views. However, it is clear that, to Borges, the fact of him actually holding those views or not was irrelevant. To us, as readers, it should appear in the same light: Borges interrogates about possible political (and, of course, aesthetic) questions in the context of which, if we feel so inclined, sides could be taken, as Borges himself did as citizen and non-fiction writer. But that is not what is at the center of his political interrogation. Borrowing from French philosopher Claude Lefort’s reflections on the relations between fiction and philosophical writing, we could say that the philosopher—or at least the philosopher who has already abandoned the position of “high

altitude thinking”—is not someone altogether different from the fiction writer. The philosopher is a writer-thinker whose writing, and whose thinking, are not only intertwined and indeed inseparable, but also laboriously engage in the practice of trying to gain “the ability to think what is itself seeking to be thought. […] The [writer-thinker] doesn’t leave the cave,” says Lefort, he or she only tries to gain “the power to advance in the darkness.”3

1 Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 1964, p. 72. The following quotes come from here.

2 Sarlo, Beatriz. Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge. London: Verso, p. 54-5.

3 Lefort, Claude. Writing. The Political Test. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000, p. XLII.

Various Futures: Borges, Game Theory, and an Intangible SwarmingNathaniel Deines

Writing about Borges (or, if you prefer, with Borges) presents an interesting challenge. Every reading of his short works produces new thoughts, casts some light – however dim – into another twisted corner of his lab-yrinth. Invariably, I write a paragraph about some small thought that the reading provoked and halfway through the paragraph I return to that same passage to confirm some aspect of the little thought and, in my rereading, I’m confronted with a completely new and possibly contradictory thought. Never has the word ‘passage’ enjoyed such a full double meaning. More than any author I’ve read, his work is like a Hereclitean river. It seems especially fitting to Borges that Hereclitus’ famed quote about how ‘you never step into the same river twice’ is apocryphal. Furthermore, it is often the case that readers of this fantastic quote focus on its object rather than its subject. In fact, more important than the ever-changing ‘river’ is the ever-changing ‘you’. This is reading Borges. In reading him, we become a bit like Pierre Menard. The words, “Oh time thy pyramids!” over a cup of tea in the morning are completely different than the words, “Oh time thy pyramids!” later in that same day or after fixing a flat tire or trying to kiss someone who refuse you. For example, in that same story about The Quixote the narrator claims that, “there is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless.” (43) Perhaps in this moment those words ring true but, it is also possible, after reading the following pages they will inspire in you a despondent contempt. It would take only the scantest powers of observation to notice the surfeit of games in the work of Borges. There are games with pieces and games with people. Games with time and games with space. In his pages he has created a world of games, some of which we’re not always conscious of playing. There is too, outside of Borges, another world of games: Game Theory. Game Theory, as I will demonstrate, is more than just a system for making strategic decisions; it is also part of a problematic relationship to the world, to time, and to others. In this paper I will attempt to investigate the forms of games that can be found in the writing of Borges (focusing almost ex-clusively on the work found in the Labyrinths collection for no other reason but to shield myself from an embar-rassment of riches, source-wise), examine the implication of Game Theory principals in his work, allude to their political implications, and explore the political alternatives Borges presents. As you will see, Game Theory presents an anticipation of the world that is rationally determined and our good Mr. Borges believes in infinity and idealism and, as such, is at least suspicious of that kind of determinism and is quite possibly violently opposed to it. It should be established immediately that the book, or the story, is one of Borges’s games. The one he plays best. The book is a labyrinth and the labyrinth is a game. This observation functions on a number of levels: The game, like the book, is always a reduction. It is a simplified scenario of a functionally infinite system and Borges famously questioned why anyone would write a book when a summary would suffice. A full-length book is still a reduction, no book can contain the totality (a fact Borges toys with in a number of stories {see Book of Sand, The Library of Babel, The Aleph}), but the book and the labyrinth share a specific quality different from many other games to which game theory is typically applied. That is, the book and the labyrinth are both given to the player/s. Books and labyrinths are different from say, chess, in that an author designed them (see Garden of Forking

Paths) and this author/reader relationship constitutes the game. The cryptogram, documents like the Sefer Yet-zirah, and the secret pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton (all noted preoccupations of Borges) also fall into this category of game. Games like these present an incongruity with Game Theory in that the opponent, if we can call it that, is the author/god. In this sense, the opponent has perfect information about the game. S/he knows all the possible solutions, is totally aware of the order that exists beyond the understanding of the player. Similarly, the cryptographer knows the cipher that will reveal the true meaning of the text, the pious kabbalist knows how to pray things into existence or how to pronounce god’s secret name. And, of course, god knows all this as well. There is, in fact, a sense that this genre of game is of a higher order to Borges. Note that chess in particular is a game often mentioned in the context of its own dismissal. That is to say, there are instances when characters have interest in chess and then give it up for more satisfying endeavors. Pierre Menard explores a modification of chess before beginning the Quixote, Herbert Ashe plays “taciturn” games of chess before the arrival of the eleventh volume of the Encyclopedia of Tlön bursts an artery in his brain, Jeromir Hladick’s nightmare before his execution (and miraculous completion of his magnum opus) is set on a giant chessboard, and in The Garden of Forking Paths Stephen Albert describes Ts’u Pên as, ”Governor of his native province, learned in astronomy, and in the tireless interpretation of the canonical books, chess player, famous poet and calligrapher–he abandoned all this in order to compose a book and a maze. He renounced the pleasures of both tyranny and justice, of his populous couch, of his banquets and even of erudition…” (24) Chess is a preliminary state and a regrettable one. Chess is a problem. In many ways, the issues Borges takes with chess are congruent with the political underpinnings of his work. I’ll return to the examples found in other stories later on, but for the moment Albert’s description of Ts’u Pên’s life and career trajectory identifies a number of these concerns in a single sentence that we can address point by point. First, let us consider Pên’s former position as governor of a province. Here we find the mark of politics (not the political, per se). The game of chess is a model of the world that is compatible with a certain kind of political outlook, such as the one outlined in Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology. It is an imposed order that reduces interac-tion between individuals to a binarial, adversarial relationship. The world is literally black and white, cooperation is nonexistent, and, most importantly for the Schmittian doctrine, is necessarily constituted by the distinction between friend and enemy. Furthermore, the pieces within the chess game are based on a monarchical structure, which itself is based on a theological structure, thereby operating within Schmitt’s assertion that all aspects of the political are secularized theological systems. Similarly, Pên has renounced the ‘pleasures of both tyranny and justice.’ Rather than a Schmittian reading of this renunciation, I think Michel Foucault is more useful when–during a 1971 televised debate with Noam Chomksy (with whom I expect Borges would share more affinities than with Foucault)–he remarked, “If you like, I will be a little bit Nietzschean about this; in other words, it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power. But it seems to me that, in any case, the notion of justice itself functions within a society of classes as a claim made by the oppressed class and as justi-fication for it.”

In this way, justice and (by extension) tyranny are but game pieces in the imposed order of class-divided societies. Describing them as ‘pleasures’ then is hilariously apt. They are invented, stabilized concepts (pawns, to use the common analogy) in which we indulge ourselves when it suits our agendas. They offer the appearance of certainty and reassure us of the order of the system. To be frank the bits about ‘astronomy’ and ‘calligraphy’ do not make compelling additions to this argument or, rather, I did not make them compelling so I have elected to omit them. One ought to be cautious of allegedly ‘complete’ texts anyway. The mention of canonical texts accesses an essential component of Borgesian critique. To canonize is to os-sify. It is to impose an enduring identity for what is in fact an arbitrary collection of objects and for Borges, I would argue, this imposition of order onto chaos is the stuff that fascism is made of. Borges interrogates the canonization of texts directly and charmingly in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius when he details the idealist version of authorship wherein, “…critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works–the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say–attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres…” (13) But Borges also interrogates this ossification of identity directly in works like Borges and I and its tragic verso: Everything and Nothing. To modern readers, poetry may seem incongruous with the other forms of order-imposition but this in-congruity can be challenged with a historical context and a consideration of language in general. Historically, Hsi P’êng’s story takes place in 1912, which would place his grandfather’s life roughly in the Late Qing period, teeter-ing on the edge of the advent of literary modernism in China. Thoroughly classical, poetry at that time would be highly ordered. More interesting, perhaps, is a larger view of language as an imposed order with its own ensuing power relationships. In an undated television interview he declares that, “Language is an artificial system that has nothing to do with reality.” He challenges the confinements of language in a number of ways but most notably by imagining truly idealist languages such as in The Immortal where he writes, “I thought of a world without memory, without time; I considered the possibility of a language without nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or inde-clinable epithets,” (112) and in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius he writes, “Their language and the derivations of their language–religion, letters, metaphysics–all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial.” (8) The world of chess is this idealist’s opposite. It is composed of objects in restricted space and these objects are necessarily defined by their qualities. There is not a knightness or a bishopness outside of their function. A knight moves up three and over one, a bishop moves diagonally until impeded. There are no qualities of the knight or the bishop that are contestable or subject to experience. They are fixed material entities operating within an internally consis-tent system that is only the dimmest reflection of reality. Such is the chess world: the allegiance to the arbitrary imposition of order. It is in this world that Game Theory can function with the most predictive capabilities. Game Theory is largely applied to economic decision making as a methodology for determining the actions of rivals. But its desperately rational strategies have enjoyed implementation on a world stage as well. One need think only of the Cuban Missile Crisis and, really, the Cold War in general. More recently that special brand of brinksmanship was played out during the contrived Federal Debt

Crisis. If you are unfamiliar with Game Theory, I can tell you without a moment’s hesitation that I am not the right person to explain it. Still, I believe that by touching on a few of its aspects (some of which have already been mentioned or alluded to) its relevance to Borges’ work will become apparent. To state it briefly, Game Theory is “…a method of study of the decision making situations of conflict.” (8) MS To be sure, there are much, much longer ways to put it. The essence of its implementation is that entities (who have no specific knowledge of each other’s intended actions) with some kind of shared interest attempt to determine (either in competition or cooperation) how the resources are to be shared. Anticipating the actions of the opposing entity determine the strategy which will bring about the most desirable outcome. Toy games like chess figure into Borges’ work but there are also instances of games operating at the narra-tive level. This is not an innovation on the part of Borges. It has been observed, he would likely be the first to ad-mit, that his work was influenced by detective stories from Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, both names that appear in Game Theory literature. Poe’s The Purloined Letter and Doyle’s The Final Problem both employ the simple Matching Pennies game common to Game Theory (feel free to check that one out, even the simplest game would overwhelm this essay with explanation). The clearest implementation of Game Theory-style reasoning occurs in Death and the Compass and The Garden of Forking Paths. In the former, Scharlach the Dandy has deftly anticipated the actions of Inspector Lön-nrot in order to kill him in order to revenge an unstated wrong. An essential (and maybe tragic) facet of Game Theory is the necessity of rational actors. It cannot be applied successfully to irrational decisions unless, of course, someone is reliably irrational but that distinction is more semantic than practical. Lönnrot, then, is a fine candi-date for this scenario since he, “…believed himself a pure reasoned, an Auguste Dupin, but there was something of the adventurer in him and even a little of the gambler.” (76) Devotees will no doubt recognize Dupin as the perspi-cacious investigator from Poe’s detective stories (before the term was coined), including The Purloined Letter, who is the prototype for Doyle’s Sherlock who, in turn, appears to be the prototype/namesake for/of Borges’ antagonist, albeit altered with an Irish brogue or Hollywood pirate patois. In typical Borges fashion, he perverts the typical detective story by handing victory to the Inspector’s nemesis. Scharlach cannily orchestrates a series of murders, certain exegetical qualities of which Lönnrot will find irresistible, leading him (Lönnrot) to avail himself to Scharlach’s pistol. In Game Theory this kind of strategy is known as backward induction. Scharlach begins with the desired future endpoint, Lönnrot’s death, and works backwards to the present. I include here an image that depicts a backward induction decision tree for the earlier Cuban Missile Crisis example. It would be difficult, no, it was difficult to try to create a coherent decision tree for Death and the Compass and so this will have to suffice. What is important about this illustration is the forking decision tree. Replace Khrushchev and Kennedy with Scharlach and Lönnrot and replace missiles, blockades, and air strikes with Tetragrammaton-inspired, cardinal-direction killings and you get the idea. But the purpose of this essay is not to illustrate some conformity of Borges in particular or literature in general to the insights and formulas of Game Theory. I think its presence is sufficiently evident. The purpose of the essay is to attempt a deeper understanding of Borges’ view of the sort of engagement with the world of which

Game Theory is emblematic. The ending of Death and the Compass begins to articulate this view when Lönnrot, moments before his death, “…looked at the trees and the sky subdivided into diamonds of turbid yellow, green and red. He felt faintly cold, and he felt, too, an impersonal–almost anonymous–sadness.” (86) Note as well that the location for this final scene is Triste-le-Roy, roy being the Anglicized version of ‘roi,’ thereby translating literally to ‘Sad, the King.’ How can we think of this sad king without thinking of the checkmated King and the sadness that comes at the final, terminal branch of the decision tree? In this place the ‘rhomb’ Scharlach plotted in murders is completed, the game has ended. The reason Lönnrot’s sadness is ‘impersonal’ and ‘almost anonymous’ is that his death, and the course which brought him to it, existed entirely outside of himself. That is to say, it was determined. Imposed. He believed himself to be in charge and more than a little clever about everything only to find out that his choices had been made for him. In short, he was not free. Bereft of uncertainty and contingency he ceases to exist for himself and becomes part of the vague material of the universe. The Lottery of Babylon describes a “republic” permeated by a grotesque concept of chance and randomiza-tion that, in practice, reveals itself to be the opposite: an intense imposition of order. In Game Theory lotteries are used in investigations of probability and payoff and in the story our narrator claims to, “…come from a dizzy land where the lottery is the basis of reality,” which, “…operates […] in an imperfect and secret manner.” (30) In Baby-lon the people have abandoned themselves to the vicissitudes of an invisible (downright mythical) administration known as The Company. Although the notion of chance is revered to the point fetishization, it is also an operation determined by a party whose exercise of control is functionally total, perverting the notion of indeterminacy al-together. Of the Babylonians the narrator says they, “...are not very speculative. They revere the judgments of fate, they deliver them to their lives, their hopes, their panic, but it does not occur to them to investigate fate’s labyrin-thine laws nor the gyratory spheres which reveal it.” (33) They believe every aspect of their lives is determined by an unseen casting of lots but to such an extent that it becomes parodic and impossible to differentiate from ‘our’ own impression of the world. In this we see again the collapsing of theological and political control. The particular use of ‘the Company’ is even more evocative of totalitarian forms of political order. But The Lottery of Babylon entertains the implications of a society structured by games of chance in fairly broad strokes. We should return to The Garden of Forking Paths where Borges offers his most intimate exploration of life chance and determination. The Garden of Forking Paths is unique not only for its intimacy but also for the sense in which it articu-lates its line of flight, the alternative to the determined, Game Theory-style engagement with the world. Contained within it is many games, but at its essence it is a duel. Let us begin most intimately though, with the contents of Pêng’s pockets:“Something–perhaps the mere vain ostentation of my proving my resources were nil–made me look through my pockets. I found what I knew I would find. The American watch, the nickel chain and the square coin, the key ring with the incriminating useless keys to Runeberg’s apartment, the notebook, a letter which I resolved to destroy immediately (and which I did not destroy), a crown, two shillings and a few pence, the red and blue pencil, the handkerchief, the revolver with one bullet.” (20)

This rummaging takes place on the story’s second page and reveals much of what is to come. First, he has the sensation that ‘something’ is compelling him to act a certain way, as if he has fallen into a groove in time that is directing him towards an inexorable conclusion. This same sensation appears later in the story as well, such as the moment when he remarks, “Something stirred in my memory and I uttered with incomprehensible certainty, “The garden…” (24) That ‘he finds what he knew he would find’ further establishes the notion of a pre-established telos. Many of the contents of the pocket are suggestive of different elements of games: coins for flipping (also the red and blue pencil, probably used for navigation, is double sided), a watch for time, and the pistol with a single bullet cannot help but evoke Russian Roulette, one of the most deadly games of all. Also contained in this moment is an elegant, almost parable-like momentary consideration of freewill and determinacy: his ‘resolve’ to destroy the letter and the immediate, parenthetical admission that he did not. Maybe it is overreaching to identify the hand-kerchief with some notion of obscurity, the je ne sais quoi of the future condition. I’m not sure that it works that way, but I’ll mention it anyway. It is this certainty of action, the foreclosure of possibility, that Pêng shares with Lönnrot and, to a certain extent, the people of Babylon. This is the critical implication for the use of Game Theory in political decision-mak-ing. Pêng remarks, “I told myself that the duel had already begun and that I had won the first encounter by frus-trating, even if for forty minutes, even if by a stroke of fate, the attack of my adversary. I argued that this slightest of victories foreshadowed a total victory,” and (in one of Borges’ most devastating lines), “The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as ir-revocable as the past.” (22) By foreclosing on any number of potential outcomes by way of some internally logical system of rationalization, a person (or a country) can be inextricably attached to its contrived end and becomes capable of justifying almost any act in its service. This critique of Borges’ is applied in the most overtly political sense against the historical materialism of Marxist tradition. In the case of The Shape of the Sword his narrator observes, “The reasons one can have for hating another man, or loving him, are infinite: Moon reduced the history of the universe to a sordid economic conflict. He affirmed that the revolution was predestined to succeed. I told him that for a gentleman only lost causes should be attractive…” (69) But the critique need not be relegated to Marxism when it appears to be just as easily leveled towards any system of power and order that proves inescapable. In their book A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze (himself a great fan of Borges) & Guattari (silent on the subject of Borges in his individual work as far as I know) write, “A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the world, or the root of the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority. […] The law of the book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two. How could the law of the book reside in nature, when it is what presides over the very division between world and book, nature and art? One becomes two: whenever we encounter this formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in the most “dialectical” way possible, what we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought.” (5)Again, the critique of historical materialism or Hegelianism is not static. That is to say, it is the critique of hierarchy in general. Sure it exists in communism but it also exists in republicanism. It also exists in language and taxonomy

(see The Analytical Language of John Wilkins), science and economics. It is a troublesome condition grown from the afterbirth of the object’s separation from the subject. But there is an alternative. For Deleuze and Guattari it is the rhizome; for Borges it is the infinite labyrinth. On his way to Stephen Albert’s home, and the location of his murderous destiny, Pêng pauses for a moment of prescient reflection on the labyrinth created by his ancestor:“Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect at the secret crest of a mountain; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water; I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms…I thought of a labyrinth of laby-rinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars. Absorbed in these illusory images, I forgot my destiny of one pursued. I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.” (23)

How fitting that in this meditation of an infinite labyrinth Pêng achieves a kind of mystical dissolution of the self! Notice too that the notion of successive time is dissolved as well and the experience lasts for an ‘unknown period of time.’ This is his fantasy: to imagine a world where he is not carried along by the arborescent, dialectical conclusions of fate. Another way to put it is that Pêng wants to be lost, to rid himself of the certainty that plagues him. This is, after all, the primary function of a labyrinth. This fantasy turns into a kind of reality when Albert reveals Pên’s labyrinth, explaining, “In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses–simultaneously–all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.” (26) The fact that this choice to choose everything is emphatically creative (the italics in the above quotation are not mine) reveals a critical disruption of power. Pên’s labyrinth is generative and decentered. It is the rhizome. Opposed to root-style books, Pên’s project generates possibilities rather than forecloses on them. Deleuze and Guattari write, “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and…and…and…”” (25) This fabric of conjunction is The Garden of Forking Paths exactly. Of course, this particular labyrinth comes to a kind of an end, or a number of ends. It ends somewhat when Albert is shot. It ends a little more when Pêng is apprehended by Madden and then still a bit more as Pêng antici-pates his own hanging. But are there any resolutions in this? Is Pêng a hero or a villain? He evaded his assassin and communicated essential information to his commanders so in that sense he is a tragic hero. But those commanders were officers of the Central Powers back in Berlin, making the hero designation fairly unlikely. Of course, Argen-tina was technically neutral during the First World War so it’s possible Borges is indifferent to global politics of that particular war but that seems exceedingly unlikely considering his apparent concerns for the World War that follows. Or is it something to do with the nearly forgettable mention of Liddell Hart and his History of World War I, a rain delayed artillery attack against the Central Powers on the Serre-Montauban line in the opening lines of the story? Liddell Hart was a real person, a soldier and a strategist. Prompted by the unthinkable death tolls during

World War One, Hart attempted to discern a strategy beyond the direct attack approach that pitted adversaries head-to-head, creating vast lines of trenches, scarred no-man’s-lands, and stacks of corpses. A stalemate, as they say. In a paper from the National Defense University, F. Lee Campbell IV writes of Hart’s strategy that, “By upset-ting the balance in the mind of one’s opponent, one seizes the initiative and creates the conditions for favorable future actions. Rational actors evaluate the situation and take actions based on their evaluation. By taking a line of least expectation, these evaluations are upset and balance is lost.” (2) Here we see that there is a kind of kin-ship between Borges and Hart. Not a filiation but a kind of alliance. There is, in both of them, a certain affection for uncertainty, for flexibility, and for possibility. For his part, Hart’s affection births the Blitzkrieg. Borges births something else entirely. A new notion of time and with it an ethical challenge. After all, “The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time…” (27) In A New Refutation of Time Borges writes, “I deny the existence of one single time in which all things are linked as in a chain,” and on to say, “I deny, in an elevated number of instances, the successive.” (222) I’ve explored elements of this in earlier sections, in so many words, this rhizome-like time, “a growing, dizzying net of divergent, conver-gent and parallel times.” (28) But how do we act in these conditions? If Game Theory (and similarly structured the-ories) encourages us to act as if there is but one outcome, how do we act if there are uncounted possible outcomes? Fittingly, the answer is not certain. There is more than a hint of a need for autonomy but I don’t think this is so in the strictly neoliberal, rational-actor sense. Borges is no collectivist. But his anarchism lacks the cold rationalism of many of today’s liberalist movements. Maybe the best way to put it then, is that most critical to Borges’ politics is the elimination of necessity. What does a human do when they are not forced to do anything? Or maybe better yet, what can a human do without being forced? I think now of The Secret Miracle. When Jakob Böhme’s story begins he is trapped in a nightmarish chess game, doubly laden by filial antagonism. In his waking hours he’s plagued by the possible futures of his immanent demise but, just before the firing line release their hammers Hladik is given a reprieve: time is frozen so that he can finish his creative work. “He was not working for posterity or even for God, whose literary tastes were unknown to him. Meticulously, motionlessly, secretly, he wrought in time his lofty, in-visible labyrinth.” (94)

BibliographyBinmore, K. G. (2007). Game theory: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.Borges, J. L., Yates, D. A., & Irby, J. E. (2000). Labyrinths: Selected stories and other writings. London: Penguin.Brams, Steven J. (1985). Ration politics: decisions, games, and strategy. Washington D.C.: CQ PressDavis, Morton D. Game Theory, a nontechnical introduction. New York, Basic BooksRosenthal, Edward C. (2000). A Complete Idiot’s Guide to Game Theory. New York: AlphaSchmitt, C. (2005). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Shubik, M. (1964). Game theory and related approaches to social behavior: Selections. New York: Wiley.

Where Sleep Should Live, I Ask my House to Exist

During the daytime hours the vault of heaven wears a pale blue guise, a

smokescreen that serves to eclipse the abyss and safely disguise the harrowing

notion of the infinite. The sensation of paralysis experienced when confronted with

the uncertainty of the space between spaces, is the anxiety that functions as the

catalyst to relinquish all personal agency in order to be swaddled by the artificial

reprieve of The Static: a coercive, alchemical masquerade of simulations that

promotes a seductive homogeneity that immobilizes the ability to perceive and

distinguish the textures of the real. When the firmament again resembles a glittering

Where Sleep Should Live, I Ask my House to Exist

During the daytime hours the vault of heaven wears a pale blue guise, a smokescreen

that serves to eclipse the abyss and safely disguise the harrowing notion of the infinite. The

sensation of paralysis experienced when confronted with the uncertainty of the space between

spaces, is the anxiety that functions as the catalyst to relinquish all personal agency in order

to be swaddled by the artificial reprieve of The Static: a coercive, alchemical masquerade of

simulations that promotes a seductive homogeneity that immobilizes the ability to perceive

and distinguish the textures of the real. When the firmament again resembles a glittering

vacuum  and  consciousness  is  no  longer  engaged  in  the  sedative  business  of  

soliciting  the  divine,  orgiastic  approximations  of  modern  life,  I  am  standing  naked  in  

the  wilderness,  pulling  at  the  weeds  of  my  malcontent.  

It  is  in  the  primal  chaos  of  night  that  we  are  no  longer  bound  by  that  delicate  

molecular  logic  and  are  confronted  with  a  solipsistic  restlessness  that  compels  us  to  

conjure  drunkenness,  to  anaesthetize  the  sleepless  anxiety  of  being  separate,  

illuminating  difference  and  assigning  the  parameters  that  cleave  the  antagonist  from  

the  friend.  Now,  thrust  into  the  shattering,  into  the  locus  of  deconstructed  veils  and  

atmosphere,  we  must  do  to  the  devil  what  he  does  to  imaginary  books.    

 

vacuum and consciousness is no longer engaged in the sedative business of soliciting

the divine, orgiastic approximations of modern life, I am standing naked in the wilderness,

pulling at the weeds of my malcontent.

It is in the primal chaos of night that we are no longer bound by that delicate

molecular logic and are confronted with a solipsistic restlessness that compels us to conjure

drunkenness, to anaesthetize the sleepless anxiety of being separate, illuminating difference

and assigning the parameters that cleave the antagonist from the friend. Now, thrust into

the shattering, into the locus of deconstructed veils and atmosphere, we must do to the devil

what he does to imaginary books.

....and the harbinger of digital patriotism is the eternally self-referential daytime junk-

ie. He hails from the fires of industry, sniffing pharmaceutical meth, lost and complacent in

a labyrinth of veils and wall-to-wall carpeting, a cybernetic dream-space that employs the

same hygienic sanctity of the airport or museum.

I had a thought about the night. There is always a sentient pushing to the realm

of unreason, a certain existential polarization that occurs maybe while walking alone

towards the 6 train on Bleeker, leaving the dark, smoky solace of after-hours at the KGB

bar in the lower east side or the revelatory interruption of our impending otherness while

sharing a drunk, commiserative tear with a companion on a starry rooftop in Los Fe-

liz. The emptiness that follows the truncation of daytime salvations is the rhizomatic crux

of what thrusts me towards thrusting, the inexorable corrective ritual of self-pleasuring,

blindly engaging in the insurgent violence of wild, wayward perversions. The bone of con-

tention exists in the vanishing point, where intimacy implodes into itself, into a certain si-

lence. I find myself caught in a successive loop of the nights waning duration, only to be

-­‐referential  

daytime  junkie.  He  hails  from  the  fires  of  industry,  sniffing  pharmaceutical  meth,  

lost  and  complacent  in  a  labyrinth  of  veils  and  wall-­‐to-­‐wall  carpeting,  a  cybernetic  

dream-­‐space  that  employs  the  same  hygienic  sanctity  of  the  airport  or  museum.    

 

I  had  a  thought  about  the  night.  There  is  always  a  sentient  pushing  to  the  

realm  of  unreason,  a  certain  existential  polarization  that  occurs  maybe  while  

walking  alone  towards  the  6  train  on  Bleeker,  leaving  the  dark,  smoky  solace  of  

after-­‐hours  at  the  KGB  bar  in  the  lower  east  side  or  the  revelatory  interruption  of  

our  impending  otherness  while  sharing  a  drunk,  commiserative  tear  with  a  

companion  on  a  starry  rooftop  in  Los  Feliz.  The  emptiness  that  follows  the  

truncation  of  daytime  salvations  is  the  rhizomatic  crux  of  what  thrusts  me  towards  

thrusting,  the  inexorable  corrective  ritual  of  self-­‐pleasuring,  blindly  engaging  in  the  

insurgent  violence  of  wild,  wayward  perversions.  The  bone  of  contention  exists  in  

the  vanishing  point,  where  intimacy  implodes  into  itself,  into  a  certain  silence.  I  find  

myself  caught  in  a  successive  loop  of  the  nights  waning  duration,  only  to  be  

awakened  by  the  clamor  of  sunny  pragmatists  and  immediately  euthanized  by  a  

banana  republic  tyrant.    

 

Where  I  live  there  are  no  auxiliary  fictions  to  live  in  tandem  with  or  to  ascend  

into  with  the  negligence  of  a  Walmart  infidel,  impatient  in  the  parking  lot  of  a  Carls  

Jr  in  Newhall.  Santa  Clarita  is  a  vacuum  of  patriarchic  masquerades,  an  arsenal  of  

civilized  poisons.  It  seems  that  I  have  found  the  antidote,  but  that  chemical  salvation  

seems  to  be  secretly  reflexive  of  the  cacophonous  condition  itself,  and  ultimately  

serves  to  reinforce  the  same  paradox  it  pretends  to  resolve.  I  can  acknowledge  that  

awakened by the clamor of sunny pragmatists and immediately euthanized by a banana

republic tyrant.

Where I live there are no auxiliary fictions to live in tandem with or to as-

cend into with the negligence of a Walmart infidel, impatient in the parking lot of a

Carls Jr in Newhall. Santa Clarita is a vacuum of patriarchic masquerades, an arse-

nal of civilized poisons. It seems that I have found the antidote, but that chemical salva-

tion seems to be secretly reflexive of the cacophonous condition itself, and ultimate-

ly serves to reinforce the same paradox it pretends to resolve. I can acknowledge that

my  patience  now  is  contingent  on  these  brief  apertures,  and  I  have  surrendered  

myself  to  a  cage.  I  abandoned  the  pious  undertaking  of  pursuing  some  kind  of  

spartan  alternative  after  a  year s  worth  of  futile  attempted  redemptions.  I  have  seen  

evidence  to  suggest  that  maybe  pretending  to  be  anything  but  a  drunk  nihilist  is  

sophomoric  and  will  never  yield  anything  but  a  gaping  abyss  inside  my  chest  and  a  

throbbing  headache.  Give  me  the  moon,  fold  my  world  with  the  private,  clandestine  

cities  that  ascend  in  fleeting,  chimeric  gestations  from  my  enduring  disappointment.  

I  sometimes  find  myself  conjuring  a  mnemonic  hallucinatory  simulation  of  another  

life,  sometimes  making  my  way  through  a  labyrinth  of  red  curtains  in  the  wings  of  a  

palatial,  monolithic  opera  

house,  or  sitting  by  a  window  

in  the  dining  car  of  a  train,  

traversing  a  landscape  that  

seems  to  deviate  in  its  

topographical  depiction  from  

any  discernible  locus  on  

earth.    

 

 

my patience now is contingent on these brief apertures, and I have surrendered myself to

a cage. I abandoned the pious undertaking of pursuing some kind of spartan alternative

after a year’s worth of futile attempted redemptions. I have seen evidence to suggest that

maybe pretending to be anything but a drunk nihilist is sophomoric and will never yield

anything but a gaping abyss inside my chest and a throbbing headache. Give me the moon,

fold my world with the private, clandestine cities that ascend in fleeting, chimeric gesta-

tions from my enduring disappointment. I sometimes find myself conjuring a mnemonic

hallucinatory simulation of another life, sometimes making my way through a labyrinth of

red curtains in the wings of a

palatial, monolithic opera

house, or sitting by a window

in the dining car of a train,

traversing a landscape that

seems to deviate in its

topographical depiction from

any discernible locus on

earth.

Where Sleep Should Live, I Ask my House to ExistAnya Levy

Noise Study (9/);

Andrew Young;

The function of the score is to reflect the abundance of the world’s sounds. The text orients the ear in space to-wards or away from contingent sounds - sounds that occur without regard for the listener. The score paraphrases

sound-events, taking them far from their context, and places them in a space where more people may examine them closely. The sounds themselves were found on opposite sides of the country, and were translated into a

concise description over the course of several days.

Andrew is a composer, improviser, noise sculptor, and coffee drinker from Rhode Island. His work ranges from quiet, intermittent textures to harsh noise, and deals closely with the limits of human perception, algorithmic

information, text, room acoustics, translational procedures, and digital technologies. He currently resides in Los Angeles where he collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and dancers in the creation of new, challenging art.

12/24/2013; Providence, RI;a harmony to which most are unaccustomed.

12/13/2013; Newhall, CA;a sound that is unconditioned.

noise study (9/); andrew young;

“It’s like I want to be more than reality, and I can not, because the reality is Is ... unreal. Say” Jorge Luis Borges

“All who repeat Marvin Gaye are Marvin Gaye” Marvin Gaye

Instinctively he had already become proficientin the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one” Jorge Luis Borges

Chris Dyson’s work for the exhibition is comprised of speakers, a microphone and software. The software, de-veloped specifically for this piece, functions by recognizing audio input and in a real time output replacing the persons speech with words and vocals that the artist has pre-selected. Regardless of what the participant speaks or sings into the mic their words are replaced in time by the track selected by the artist and amplified across the room.

The work has developed from multiple sources within Borges writing, probably reaching clarity at some point after reading “Everything and Nothing”, 1958. The voice is transgressive, a reenactment or simulation. There is desire to be in/the reality and in that reality is humor. Borges presents us with an alternative to inhabit or to be inhabited. Or both simultaneously - to become a component in the system of delivery.

All who repeatChris Dyson

“I was thinking about how we can use Borges to ground our project. I read the story recently; ‘Borges and I’ and it appears to be an interesting way into this robot/interface/automaton/inter-passivity chat we had. The text is super short and explores - if I am not totally missing the point - the interplay between first and third person speech exploring the precarity of author and sub-jectivity. Taking the stuff we discussed with R D Laing and ‘the divided self ’ and the NPR podcast about ‘when we speak to robots’ (the online dating stuff I think was super interesting) I think it’s all relevant to our discussion - we could keep the proposal not too tied down and say we will make a film. I think it could be interesting for us to think also about our duplicity in how we make the work.Random Idea - Bonaventure hotel in downtown, super interesting place. It’s super sci fi and there is this experience I had of identity crisis maybe in its super complicated layout or its super re-flective surfaces or maybe I was having an existential crisis. Maybe we make a film in one of the rooms. Regardless of my hackneyed reconstitution I think we have something good and would love to see what you think about the ‘Borges and I’ or is it ‘I and Borges’ I forget anyways it’s in the Labyrinths.”

Through storyboards, dialogue, sounds and shortfalls of annotations the video constructs a narrative that seeks to replicate Borges method of incorporating the process and artifice of writing within his work. The artists were par-ticularly interested in looking at how self reflexivity operated within negotiating the collaborative process, how this reveals levels of absurdity and complicates the discussion around the infinite possibility of imagining into the real.

“The other one, is the one things happen to.” 3mins 23sec HD video

Chris Dyson, Alice Lang

The fantastic landscape and the real landscape are consumed by fossil fuels. The majority of my work is about human rights and how environmental degradation violates those rights.

I am an organizer and a painter. “Oil Painting” was my first solo video piece and it was of interest to me to at-tempt to approach film as a painter using very simple materials. In a sense “Oil Painting” is a film and a painting.

Oil PaintingCori Redstone

Materials:Atomic FireballsA handful of sand from the Sahara Desert in the region of Douz in TunisiaA Navajo style rug made in IndiaA Kurt Ostervig armless dining chair

Instructions:Place the given objects in an arrangement that mirrors the constellation most directly above the rug at midnight in the location that it is installed. For the Ostervig chair, use the end of the front right leg which is painted red as its marker.

The title of the piece, The Floor/The Stars Tonight, is derived from the parallel intentions for the sculpture. Borges’ work is significantly inspiring in the way that he conflates the mundane with the sublime. In the Lottery in Babylon, Borges describes a company that uses a lottery system to randomly subject different members of society to either a punishment, or a reward. Because the process is completely secretive, there is no way of knowing whether or not a given situation was determined by an all-powerful company, or by chance. In a similar way, I wanted the sculpture to be able to be read as a messy floor that could potentially exist in real life as well as a chart depicting a star con-stellation through specific objects from all over the world and all different points in time.

I find that the candy and the ancient sand balance each other out in a Borgesian way. I was drawn to Atomic Fire-ball candy because they possess seemingly universal formal qualities but with extremely potent and specific cul-tural meaning (also because stars are essentially atomic fireballs). The sand from the Sahara is ancient; itsgrains are very fine and feel like silk. In the Bible, God refers to stars and sand as a metaphor for the multiplicity of Abraham’s descendants. The Navajo rug made in India in itself is a kind of Möbius strip of the real and representational: A rug made in India designed to look like it was made by the group of people who were once mistaken to being from India. The chair is a prime example of the Danish Mid Century Modernist style from the 1950’s. All of the objects were found online.

The Floor/The Stars TonightDaniel Bruinooge

Rather than think of fiction as that which is outside the realm of non ‐fiction, Borges prompts me to consider non‐fiction as only a slightly distorted version of fiction. The mirroring of one state onto its mildly altered proxy suggests that they are infinitely interchangeable. This perpetual relocation serves as the infrastructure of uncer-tainty that, in turn, sustains the nightmare that Borges’ stories produce. The recent surveillance hysteria in the media resulting from the massive leaks of classified information on surveillance programs was indeed a lesson in Borgesian narrative: using constant surveillance to enable the retroactive reconstruction of a person’s life at any moment can be understood as a powerful tool for fabricating fiction. If the idea behind the forensic construction of a possible life is to string together information from different pools of data in order to recreate a person, a profile, a life, how are we not to understand this as only a possibility? The interpretation that is necessary to transform this information into a narrative renders it a clumsy technique when used in the realm of surveillance and thus my attempt to replace it in the realm of fiction. In doing so, I hope to address the mutually rewarding positions of both surveillance and sousveillance in our performance of privacy.

Each selfie in this album contains an encrypted text file that corresponds to a determined category of self- tracked information that has been gathered with life-logging applications. Instructions on how to decrypt the selfies are provided on site- crunching and encrypting only the possibility of a narrative within layered visibility.

allmyselfies dot bizDanielle Bustillo

Writer’s Block

There’s a bird caughtin the tree outside my window,

a wire looped around itsdelicate foot, as leaves

emerge in that early greenthat’s almost a yellow. I thought to write

about the bird, how it struggledwith awkward strokes, lashed

to the branch. But I know it’s notthat simple. Not every image

that stays with you, the wayone wing still hangs as if a salute,

is poetry. Sometimes it’s liesyou’re telling. Sometimes the dead

must be alive. This is a poemabout the spring, how it’s a sweater

hanging outside my window, how it’s a birdinside my hand, and the trees

blossoming sevens, that couldbe leaves or even feathers.

FILM COLOR, 1950In order to create color home movies, families could send their black and white film to companies which would add color to it using stencils and dyes.

As I watch my mother’s family,on our living room television, I see the waythe man who took their movie changed them.The man I picture set up

on a broad glass desklit from below. Covered with their filmit looked like a dragonfly wing. Whenmy mother’s family sent in their home movie, maybe

he bent over the images and slowly criticizedthe limits of their instructions. How ashe sat down with the exquisite brush,any gesture was a sentence.

I suspect the holes inmy memory are beginningto seep. I know the eyeis used to seeing reflected light.

In his line of work,missing details left entireneighborhoods to berebuilt by his intuition,his ideal color scheme,as he added pastel dyeto the daily emulsion,to the early ridges of mygrandfather’s fishing-line face.One frame could containa house so brightit was like a swarm of bees.

Or a house this color, righthere, the color that fills the housewith children, that keeps awayquestions like who will break the bread?Who will take up that worn flute?The color that sets them upto be remembered as they truly were.

When I watch my six-year-old mother,her eyes are the wrong color. He is the keeperof that memory, or maybesomewhere in the infiniteexpanse of space my mothergrows up in a house with blue eyes,rides a tractorand I watch. The mancreates my mother, Icolor her life, and she goes onexploding and contractingso fast you could mistake itfor a single point of light.

Drew Straus

This video clip contains a short instruction intending to transform people in classroom to participants of live per-formance.

Mirroring and Absurdity:

The instruction is ‘observing and mimicking another person’ in classroom, and people are in loop. So if everyone follows the instruction, one ends up mimicking oneself through others in principle. But at the same time, by fol-lowing instruction, one cannot perform oneself - except oneself who performing the given role - since they per-form adjectives not nouns: mimicking is different from identifying.

If one follows the instruction, s/he is not able to see what is happening in the whole classroom. And if one does not follow the instruction, s/he might able to see whole happenings in classroom but still might influence on others since someone might observe and mimic him/her. And nobody can exactly mimic another person since each per-son has different object person and thus has different direction of staring; if one mimics another’s staring direction, s/he is not able to fulfill what instruction requires. Therefore nobody can be a perfect performer or mere audience of this performance. In other words, nobody can be free from the instruction given whether one is submissive or against although everyone plays an imperfect role in this system.

Live PerformanceJihyun Kim

“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. They said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’ But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The LORD said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’ So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world.

In The Library of Babel, Borges foresees a future archive containing every line of text, every letter, that has ever been written. Though no one person could ever read, or even look at, all of this in their lifetime, “the certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms.”

Internet Rule #34: If it exists, there is porn of it. GoogleTranslate is a prophet. Copy and paste any text remove the punctuation from it and run it back and forth through about 30 other languages then back into English. Repeat the text and do it again. I call this GoogleFuck-ing. To GoogleFuck.

“The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner but they do not know how to decipher a single letter I suspect that the human species the unique species is about to be extinguished but the library will endure.”

Googlefucked: Writing for me to highlight the current tax methods Human supervision Everything we write is certainly not rec-ognize Let’s Mirage As a young county Books prostate and kiss before their barbaric page Way but do not know how to interpret the same letters disease the phenomenon of conflict peregrination inevitably deteriorate in rob-beries, and decimated stocks I mentioned suicide more often every year The current process of human develop-ment don’t interfere with work, enter the question in writing otherwise, to accept or refuse, but they prove that you finance young guns a unique nature in different ways actually only one-way, I know, but I think a practical way to know is the death of our buildings or things that hide in the Green Paper to be used write, you have the current state the french kiss does happen book, I know how barbaric methods of youth in the area, such as, but a love of nature and man, I think this book shows the variety, but you do not have in the library

Tower of Babel Tower of Babble or Please Note That The Way the Current Financial Monitor Everything I Wrote

Joey Cannizzaro

I Have Read All the BooksJohanna Kozma

untitledJustin Crosby

My piece is inspired by the language of the northern hemisphere of Borges’ Tlön, in which nouns are made by com-bining adjectives. The adjectives that describe the materials,  forms, and juxtapositions of the sphere were fore-most among my considerations when making this piece.

Lucia Prancha

This work plays with the idea of putting myself under the skin of the other, and vice-versa. Or, to a lesser extreme, even a reflection of someone else in me. Or, in the very act of introspection we objectify the self. We experience our self as if it belongs to other people. In other words, the mental activity that occurs through the process of reading events.

I constructed a parallel association, building from two texts. One is by Borges “I, a Jew”, and, the other is a sentence from the letter written by Rimbaud to Georges Izambard - May 13, 1871: “Je est un autre” [I is another]. In the former, Borges wrote about his relation with the Holocaust problematic and how others participated, actively or passively, with this political event.

The work is constituted by a mirror pedestal with my height, and a poster with an inverted text. The surface of the pedestal receives the reflection of the other works in the exhibition. The short fiction relates to the self and, it is read in the mirror surface.

Reflecting Borges literature, my work instigates the tension between the self and the other. Throughout the process of reading the work, the audience will play, as a ping- pong game, with the mental and physical objects in the space. A reverse shot relationship between what is reflected on the other, what is a reflection on the self, and vice-versa.

Lucia Prancha

Untitled (2013)HD AnimationDuration: 3:25

Nicholas Johnston

Untitled is an animation featuring alpine desktop wallpapers, and relies on the visual techniques of parallax and the so-called Ken Burns Effect to shift perspective through the frame. To think of “place” is to think visually, and the desktop wallpaper (along with the calendar and the coffee table book) celebrates an exceptionalism that regur-gitates a geography (locale) as an iconic symbol. Borges constantly challenged the notion of certainties (a thing being only one thing), and the animating of these static images is intended to alter perception — working to block the sublime read of an image meant to be sublime. In their manipulation, the same strategies of image formulation are re-appropriatied, aiming to confuse and to helicopter above their own construction.

The Fascist Vegetarians of Madison WisconsinNick Saltrese

Action 1: The translator approaches.

First one then two other cars hit this object: the metal L the inverted T, whatever extra fancy names or letters you want to attach to a renegade piece of scrap metal bouncing in the road...

In certain versions of the Iraqi translator’s story, the couple stay together, the L or inverted T stays on the highway untouched, the car moves on, passing over the metal unscathed, and the tow truck driver never gets the tattoo of the couple and the dog on his arm.

We had hit a blunt object along the way and our car had stopped in front of an Exit Sign which said “Bijou 47.”

The exit sign for “Bijou 47” flashes in the background, Zoom In on this sign.

“I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.”

The exit sign for “Bijou 46” flashes in the background.

Volumes XLVI and XLVII of the encyclopedia were the same edition, the exterior number was erroneous, XLVII was a reprint of XLVI with a different cover, an extra ‘I’ made all the difference at the end of that string of roman numerals. Also there was an extra four page entry in Volume XLVII, with an entry on an ancient Iraqi civilization called Uqbar.

Reflecting on the new information was harrowing, I made that harrowing aspect my reward.

Father Gummy was his name and he had two twin daughters, both of whom were beautiful and both of whom wore round tortoise shell glasses, the younger of the two was younger by two minutes and was infinitely sharper than the first.

The day began with his face an inch away from Father Gummy’s shoe, not a kick or a fall, but a close look at his reflection in the leather. You know the kind of thing a 19 year-old does after reading On The Road? He starts look-ing closely at old shoes before embarking on a long journey, at least that’s what I did. But before going on a long

journey, I had to rake the lawn. It was my punishment for throwing away the gem which Herbert, a family friend, had given me. In previous years Herbert had given me the works of Borges, Kerouac and Woolf. Kerouac didn’t seem to fit, he stuck out from the modernism of Woolf and even the post-modernism of Borges, but he did seem to literalize and embody the adventure that the others had merely imagined. Everything I’ve just said is probably false. The following is an account of my grandfather’s childhood friend Thomas, who passed away in the winter of 1946, just a year after the World War II ended and certain fascist regimes were seemingly brought to a halt. Thomas had been very close with the Gummy twins and had even punished him for loving them both at separate times, but his death was not spelled from this kind of punishment, or from the throwing out of Herbert’s gem, rather it came from ignoring certain truths, or certain gifts of knowledge that came to him just in time, and he had waited just a minute too long to process them. Thomas’ Aunt Emma had been a personal acquaintance of Borges. They had met during World War I in Switzerland and had bonded over The World As Will And Representation. They argued about sections XLVI and XLVII of the fourth and supplemental section “On The Vanity And Suffering of Life” and “On Ethics.” They had had a mysterious falling out in Dumfries, Scotland, during the War, after her, Borges and a third person (also known as the drunk driver or possibly Trungpa) had crashed into a joke shop one snowy christmas eve, leaving the drunk driver partially paralyzed. Aunt Emma didn’t drive, and Borges’ vision had completely deteriorated by then. The drunk driver was rumored to be a Trungpa from Tibet, who had escaped from the Chinese Police two winters prior. There were even rumors that the Trunpa’s “accident” was intentional, a kind of prank pulled on both of them as they discussed the difference between Ethics and Vanity. Borges and Thomas’ Aunt Emma were unharmed in the accident, so the prank seemed rather harmless, and largely played on the owner of the joke shop. Thomas bent down to try the harrow the day it arrived. He felt guilty about his vanity and all the people he had walked on to get to his relatively high position in life (a live narrator for the Cinema of the Blind), so he wanted to get a full back piece tattooed which professed his faith in others and undermined it in himself. After receiving the tattoo, which was an elaborate, three-part river system in ancient Iraq that Thomas believed to be a microcosm of the world’s sea and wind currents as well as the path that oxygen takes as it fills the two lungs and is then converted into blood flow moving through the two hemispheres of the brain... After getting this tattoo Thomas stopped calling the church and shrugged off the Gummy twins, whose beauty behind the four lenses had kept him enraptured with the idea of his own face being multiplied and magnified in that bloody flower field where he and many young men, who had thrown away life’s gems and not done their raking, had fallen in love so often. From then on Thomas stopped donating to Father Gummy’s church and called all of his own individual suffering alms, but Vern couldn’t be sure if it wasn’t the nearby Father who influenced this naming or dropping a coin into a hat, which was passed between hands and continued out of sight into a system that guaranteed a sweet return. In a word: heaven. Both reasons were compelling, although he liked the latter more because he didn’t think too highly of the Father and didn’t want to give undue credit to a corrupt man, when God was really the true author behind the exchange.

Thomas was currently in the midst of rewriting his autobiography. He was no longer a Christ figure with morality

built into his system. Nor was he a great composer wrapped up in the tragedy of self-discovery. The rewriting of his autobiography would begin with an avid denial of the most obvious facts, where and when he was born would have to be changed.

Having to free himself from one side of seeing the world, he looked in the mirror and asked, “What ever happened to your face?” It was not in a disparaging way that he did this, it had more to do with a serious inquiry into the nature of time and the nature of his life after Herbert had gifted him the gem and the Borges book.

He looked down at the sink and even below that. A necessary and liberating question, he had counted 81 white tiles on his bathroom floor and nine rusty nails on a post that the mirror hung on, those three elements combined and seemed to match the description of his face: innumerable profiles with a familiar thread running through that was troubled delicate and rough, walked over with many ideas out of an odd kind of necessity, of going on in life through ditches to gain power while lying low, to rise without officially rising, that was Tlön for you: a ditching of certain facts to propagate others, what Beckett called the “Great Siege” or the “The Gem With Eyes and Not Points” after he’d been living off potatoes in a ditch for two years. Tlön was also a series of roads, Tlön was also a letter, Tlön was also an artifact.

Who knew that Death could be called to us when all we knew of Death was blown for us already at first in the lyrics of pop songs, and we went on living unperturbed. It was only when we’d hit that artifact in the road that we realized we had called death to us. In the whirling event, the event of it already happened. The man reeling over a copy of a gem and then throwing it in the road. A shy German man named Herbert had given me the gem and only bad luck had hit me ever since, so I threw it in the road, two weeks later. Herbert gifted it to me two weeks before Christmas, my life only got worse after receiving his little gift. The following day I totaled my car and met the Iraqi translator, who followed us onto the shoulder of the road.

Driving, he would have cursed the bastard behind him except he didn’t want the energy to come back to him, he couldn’t afford such a harsh return on his thoughts.

He thought of something that he wanted. His eyes lit up and he let his mind wander.

Hitting the object, there are sparks under the car, an axle is snapped, they lose control of the vehicle, all they can do is pull over to the shoulder of an overpass, next to the exit sign which flashes “Bijou 46/47” alternately.

The translator pulls over to the shoulder along with them, amazing he didn’t hit them when they went over the debris, slowing when the collision was made. Amazing he got out of his car to help them.

They hit the object and the young man thinks that the translator thinks some piece of debris from their car has it

hit him. The young man’s thoughts were not that powerful, he was often wrong about what he thought.

The young man gets scared, a frog leaps up in his throat, the translator exits the car. He reaches for his knife, his wife and dog beside him, he wants to protect them both.

Their car has lost all its gasoline and transmission fluid, it will never drive again. The translator approaches. The young man closes his knife and gets out of the car, accepting his fate.

“Fate” says the Iraqi translator to the couple, expecting no gift for his blunt message, which really was quite sharp if you traced the meaning of fate to its final root, fate simply meant to speak, and speak simply meant to scatter.

The lines on his arm offer a rewarding sight for masochists and the unlucky alike.

Before climbing down the overpass a man stops ahead, on the shoulder, he is smiling wide. He is from Iraq. He claims to be a military translator. We believe him.

The Iraqi Translator would be good to them, leaving them more space than they originally thought.The Iraqi Translator. His ring matches her tattoo.A three-part river system.

The translator has no hair on his head. His smile is wide. His build is squat.His clothes are sturdy. His eyes are light.

At first he seems angry. Later he turns out to be nice. He offers the couple a ride home.He is all of 100 miles away. It is his day off, he frowns when they say no.

The couple thanks him, opting to deal with the accident themselves.He leaves and they pull their dog out of the car. A tri-color dog of black, white and brown, according to frequency. There is very little brown.If an admission of guilt should surface somewhere in the client’s second or third story then it wasn’t his job to pros-ecute, it was only his job to highlight the crime that was already there. I keep telling myself the story of how I got into the accident to understand what exactly it is that I’ve done that is wrong. My crime was one of exaggeration and repulsion.

It was all like a very serious game of telephone, where words passed from ear to mouth getting warped as they went, arriving like disfigured travelers when they finally reached the end of the line, or the shoulder of the road, where the Iraqi translator waited under the sign Bijou 46/47, depending on how I looked at it.

The case he dealt with today was peculiar for too many reasons.

“She was running for the phone,” he explained as a side note.

“Apparently she missed,” cried Sam who Henry had failed to notice until then. She had only momentarily lifted her face from the unlit couch of pillows and stuffed animals, only to bury it back into the tear-sodden plush that Emma generally regarded with such care that to see Sam weeping into them now was almost a greater abomination than the sight of Aunt Emma on the floor. Who had missed the call from Borges, one she had been waiting for all afternoon. His call had been an insidious form of violence, as this was the time before caller ID and cellphones. He had promised her a call but he’d only rang twice before either hanging up or getting cut off we’ll never know. Knowing Borges, we’ll assume he got cut off, as he was a man of unshakable character. His morality often got him into trouble, people sometimes saw his gentle observations as a searing critique of their daily life and so hurled criticisms at him unduly because they were afraid of living a life without illusions. They were afraid of Virginia Woolf, another truth sayer who Borges admired, and finally they were afraid of Borges himself, because their sen-sitive minds could not handle the truths he delivered in parables and fictions, in little gems of prose that were his modest gifts to humanity, modest yet immense. Gifts that multiplied over time.

“Well don’t talk about me like I’m dead,” said Aunt Emma out of her palms. That was the first thing I’d heard her say, after she’d run into the wall when Borges finally rang her at 1:35 that afternoon. We can only assume it was Borges calling, as he’d promised her he’d call that day, and no one else called, but he’d only rung four times and then hung up or got cut off, but most likely cut off as Borges was known to be a man of unshakable character. Keep in mind, this was the time before caller id and cellphones, so she had to wait all day to hear from him, as he would be calling from a pay phone and she wouldn’t be able to call him back. He was doing a series of lectures somewhere in Europe. Berlin or Oxford, I forget which.

This time the gem was felt, it was as though he were giving the driver an essential feature of his old character which crying out the gem of his insights, proclaiming his deepest feelings to an unwilling, caged audience.

He ignored the commands of the man as he tore into his turkey leg and the shrieks of the woman as they only sounded like vague but laudable whispering. Why were the man and woman crying. Because they’d just learned that the turkey had been poisoned by renegade animal rights activists from Madison, Wisconsin. The message came via national emergency alert, it played through 98% of US towns on loudspeaker at 1:35 in the afternoon, pacific time, on Thanksgiving day. People on the radio were calling it the second plague. One of the primary

symptoms of the onset of poisoning was a growing sense of hilarity, and a general breakdown of those thoughts that formerly plagued the troubled minds of the meat eaters.

Thomas heard their warnings too late. Now they were only pieces of words as though their beginnings and endings had been cut off long ago by the effusive migration from the diaphragm to the lungs, the lungs to the lar-ynx, the larynx to the tongue, the tongue to the air, the air to his ear, where the direct message came as a hushed whispering from so far away.

At that moment he was too enthralled by the gnashing of his own teeth, and the mechanization of his jaw. How-ever he was aware that they watched with a certain jealousy. For his ravenous freedom could never be repro-duced, not even by the most untamed child attempting to imitate him. He thought of the gem Herbert had given him nearly two years ago and began to laugh, then he felt a certain hardening in his chest, disrupting the flow in his chest as though the highway had never left him.

1 See “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” 2 Kafka originally coined the term, he borrowed it from the Yiddish Theatre in Prague. The job of a narrator paid so highly that Thomas was able to change the fate of many a wise listener without paying a crown. Instead, he used words as cur-rency, and the true seers of the world would relay the newsreels back to the crows who delivered the news from the phone lines and made a myth of the modern day**Please excuse my nephew’s poetic flourishes, none of the information in the footnote above is true, but I have kept it out of a sense of respect for childhood’s inexhaustible ambition.

Artist Statement/Afterward

“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” already invaded my life, long before I’d read it, reading it was just a troubling confirmation of what was already there. I could relate that invasion to an anecdote I’d heard from a distant family friend who died in a car accident in Colorado Springs nearly two years ago, after recovering from a mass poison-ing one month prior. My distant family friend, had an Aunt Emma who had studied with Borges in Switzerland during World War I, but this was the same horribly inarticulate family friend who claimed to be a great nephew of Wordsworth. Thomas (RIP) had lived in Bogotá, Colombia for ten years, where he had fallen in love with Magical Realism and there discovered Borges thanks to his Aunt’s distant prodding, before returning to the States where he and his wife and dog would die in a highway accident with a fresh bag of McDonald’s between them, a copy of Selah Saterstrom’s The Meat and Spirit Plan and John D’Agata’s About A Mountain, the former of which his wife was apparently reading to him as they hit the renegade piece of scrap metal, which bounced out of the truck behind them. Because I could not perceive of Tlön from a single angle I had to fall back on the Rashomon technique to tell the story, not to refashion Borges, but to hint at how the allure of his language and the appearance of his ordering of the obscure had drawn me into a conspiratorial world, which I had always thought about but had been too par-anoid to articulate.

“I fell asleep in the cradle of a Death’s hand where I then rose up the bone into that pale column of light, the marrow was blood and the blood was too sharp and too bright for my soft body to resist, the blood cut me, if that makes any sense...” No, it didn’t, but that was Thomas’ last journal entry, and even though it didn’t make very much sense there was some passion hiding in it if not the ambition and hope of a young poet which I can only appreciate now that Thomas is gone. That brief fragment was written after Thomas had left the church, he was only involved in the church because he was in love with the daughters of the very Father who had baptized him.

The second-half of the anecdote about Borges was dubious: it had to do with Thomas’ Aunt Emma having a nervous breakdown and regressing to a second childhood because she’d missed a phone call from Borges on the day her late husband had died. It hardly seemed to do with Borges, and only revealed Thomas’ callousness to me. But I was wrong about Thomas’ callousness, he was a very tender young man, what he lacked was a firm grip on reality. Reality means nothing, in my opinion, if compassion and empathy are lacking... Poor Thomas, he had such a faint grip on reality, and for that I came to appreciate him when I was seeking escape from the world. Such a grip faint, and it seemed to be composed of more sound than image, kind of rhythmic like the breath of an animal hiding inside his lungs, the animal and the second life of the animal that both Kafka and Dostoyevsky wrote about, when characterizing their consumptive symptoms, for both of them disease became an opportunity for a second life, even if that life was tuned to a winding down rather than a winding up, perhaps time was slowing in those final moments for those two great authors and perhaps that is why they were able to see so much in a single glimpse, or gesture, like Borges’ “Aleph” the single image, or gap, or lack, in any moment became the whole where the entirety of the cosmos could be perceived. I never got past the first action of the story, yet I feel that the illustrious problem

of joining the “unknown family” has crystalized in that frozen gesture: of the Iraqi translator approaching a newly wrecked car, to see if the people and the animal inside could be saved, and perhaps I have yet to digest all of what “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” meant to me.

1See “Kafka and His Precursors”

Tommy Wiseau (actor, director, star) plays the character Johnny in the sprawling psychological drama, The Room (dir. Tommy Wiseau, 2003). Johnny is in love with his girlfriend Lisa. Lisa secretly finds Johnny boring and lusts after his friend, Mark. Denny, the local collage boy, and Johnny’s surrogate son, is attracted to Lisa. Denny also has a drug problem. The movie is not inherently Borgesian, although it is a bit Labyrinthine. I, Nick Hanson (artist), have made a work that is The Room, but better. Like the fictional writer Pierre Menard, writing a better Quixote, I have made a better The Room. Bill Gibron, critic for the website popmatters.com writes about Tommy Wiseau’s The Room: “In the dynasty of dung, among the many pretenders to the best worst movie throne, Tommy Wiseau and his oddly named tragedy truly earns their rotten rep”. Another critic, Sarah Boslaugh writes, “If you experience brain damage as a result of watching this film, I disavow any responsibility whatsoever”. Where my version of The Room and Tommy’s version of The Room differs is that I have removed the film from its original context, which is the context of traditional “Hollywood” type films with gripping narratives and traditional acting, and placed it in a new context where the film can thrive and finally be recognized for the masterpiece of experimental cinema that it is. Tommy Wiseau’s The Room is a mess of bad acting, confusing narrative, and questionable film work. Nick Hanson’s The Room is a masterpiece of alienation, aware of it’s own filmic status, thus making it capable of commenting on and exposing the horrible film clichés that the film industry has repeatedly relied on in order to sell their mindless work. The context was not right when Miguel de Cervantes wrote the Quixote. However, when Pierre Menard wrote the Quixote, the time passed had given the work a new context, where it could become a stronger work. Nick Hanson’s The Room accomplishes the same thing.

Nick Hanson’s The Room

Quadraped and the Games of Devin Johnson

“Yeah, [that game] still haunts me.” – ‐ Frank Stein, Quadraped: Half‐Cause, Half–Effect

Few things in the worlds of esotericism or video–game–geekery have caused as much stir as the work of game–programmer Devin Johnson. He has been called a genius, a game– changer, a charlatan, a reclusive com-puter enthusiast who programmed like a lunatic. But how a shut ‐in computer programmer from Hurricane, Utah came to make such a mark on this specialized community is particularly striking when it is considered that there is only one work that survives Johnson’s death in 1996: the video game Quadraped. At this point, many things have been said of Quadraped. The game, or “game” as some prefer to call it (quotation marks abound when discussing any aspect of Quadraped) has been passed around (on floppy disk, no less), been the subject of one book (Frank Stein’s Quadraped: Half Cuase Half Effect, quoted above) and inspired endless message board and blog posts. Despite this, it is still difficult to describe what happens in Quadraped exactly. To begin with, Quadraped uses the old alpha–numerical graphic model (only using symbols you can find on a keyboard), which lends itself to abstraction. This is the crude type of illustration where a hash–tag (#) surrounded by asterisks (*) could be called a star. Quadraped’s title screen, which is the easiest part of the 1 game to describe, contains only “Quadraped”, “Start”, and “Quit” written in X’s and backslashes. Little asterisks “explode” into periods and commas in a crude firework display. The crudeness, as it turns out, is a necessity for Quadraped, at least in its value as a curio. If one was deal-ing with very early computers, a screen of alpha– numerical characters representing a jungle or what– not would be appropriate, but Quadraped was not made for early computers. Johnson authored the game during the third generation of personal computers—Macintosh, Amiga, 286/386 PCs. These computers ran 16–bit graphics with full color and sound. The memory requirements for games of Quadraped’s crudeness would usually run 16–32kb. But Quadraped’s necessary memory is much higher, weighing in at about 1.2 MB. In short, the game filled far too much space for what it seemed to do. This was first noticed by Kevin Schmidt, an archivist at the Digital Conservancy of San Francisco, who found the game while uploading the files of Bill Evans, an early designer for Apple. When Kevin first mentioned Quadraped to Bill, Bill audibly sighed: “Oh,” he said. “That thing.” It seems that Devin mailed Quadraped multiple times to Bill in 1989. After some investigation, it turned out Devin mailed Quadraped to a good number of people, but Bill was certainly his favorite: he mailed Bill copies of the game on enough occasions that Bill felt compelled to write Devin and tell him to stop. The correspondence that followed remains the closest thing to an interview that Devin Johnson ever gave. “The game doesn’t play,” wrote Bill at one point. “Please do not send more copies. The Macintosh team, nor I, are interested in receiving more copies. Save the disks.” Devin’s response was a short note, along with yet another copy of the game. The note read “The game does play,” and then the enigmatic, “It plays very well.” “Being told I cannot play a game is a kind of insult, I felt,” Bill

said. “So I tried to play the game. Many times.” As Bill played, he began to apprehend a certain uncanny feeling: “I knew I was playing, somehow,” said Bill, “Everything I tried to do didn’t really go anywhere necessarily, but I kind of knew that my presence, my input, was doing something.” Bill asked Devin for instructions. Devin responded with an explanation that Bill will never forget. “He said that the game is called Quadraped because there are four legs. You play one of the legs. There is also a brain, a heart, and a rudimentary digestive system. [He said] ‘I have tried to make it as realistic as possible.’” “This didn’t help me at all of course,” says Bill. “I had no idea even what I was looking at, three X’s with a clock under it [Bill is referring here to two digit spaces near the left hand corner where numbers seem to “count-down”, move from 99- ‐00 and then repeat, at somewhat even intervals], and mountains of backslashes and forward slashes, switching back and forth. . . the idea of being a leg was totally confusing.” What Bill is attempting to describe here is one of the most elusive elements about Quadraped. Described by art critic Frank Stein as “specific yet unpredictable” , 3 the effect that players seem to have with Quadraped- ‐ at least with those who are fans of the game- ‐ is a real sense of partial causality. That, though incomprehensible as a whole, the game has, undeniably, threads of causality that work in certain inconsistent circumstances. These threads force the player to accept that rules exist, however disjointed and fragmented. That we can never really get more specific than that, or that we maybe can- ‐ but within a great number of qualifications- ‐ is perhaps why the game has such an effect on players, an effect that has been called alienating, unnerving, and haunting. Frank Stein: “The game is quite addictive, strangely. One wins, (s)he loses, and (s)he can’t figure why. Not exactly why. I found myself playing it again and again, trying to do the exact same thing in the beginning to remove variables, moving forward with experiments after I ran out of sure moves. I played not for entertainment, exactly, but just to ascertain rules... but I kept playing.”

Bill admits he was affected by the game, but says at the time he preferred not to think about it. When asked if it was because it made him uncomfortable, Bill stated, “Oh no. Not at all. It just wasn’t something I cared to think about. I was in the business of making things that worked, you know, that people could use and get what they wanted out of them. [Quadraped] just seemed the total opposite of that.” Where Bill was slightly amused, Keith was obsessed. He began spreading word about the game. “I didn’t call it art,” says Keith, “but when people call it that, I don’t disagree.” Tech nerds began to dig up their old systems just to play the bizarre little game. Soon an emulator version of the game was available, and Quadraped became a viral phenomenon amongst hardcore gamers. A forum sprung up on IGN, where a group of players began to post cheat codes to Quadraped. Usually a means to unlock some area or aspect of the game, the cheat codes for Quadraped have started to sound more like an attempt to build a unified theory of the game. Some people propose, for example, that the game never ends, no matter how many times you die. All

data is saved at all times, and reset is a fallacy created by the presence of a Game Over screen and re-starting at a similar (seemingly exact) location again. In reality, all the rules are changed by the fact you have already once played the game. Game Over screens and Start screens, one theory goes, are much like bonus areas between levels in more traditional games. Pressing Start, within a certain amount of time changes the circumstances in the “next game”, which is really another round of the game already began. There are many theories of hidden hit–point bars, invisible cues that occur at certain bpms. One theory claims if a metronome is set of 62 BPMs, during every 4th measure [4:4 time] a dollar- sign ($) appears on the character’s body. The effects of this dollar–sign on gameplay is still unknown. Some go as far as to suggest that the player is actually playing a completely unseen and unsee‐able game, which exists independently but influences the results of the ostensible game. Guesses as to what this hidden game is have been various: chess, pong, Super Mario Bros. The Super Mario Bros. claim has been proven false by experts in the game, but other games are still in dispute, and may always be, for various reasons. 1

Some claim that what players have generally assumed is the character is misleading–that the whole screen is the character and that one requires “soft focus” and many minutes of non–play before any sense can be made of the motions. Players should then interact with the game in an “intuitive manner.” Certain secret screens have been reported, some documented on Youtube. Apparently a firework screen with “Good Job, Leg!” can appear and is immediately followed by the title screen, foregoing the Game Over screen. The instances of “Good Job, Leg!” remain so few that its full effect on gameplay, with all the other possible factors, is still unknown. There are, of course, detractors. The hype, they contend, has created a type of Rorschach effect with the game. People see what they want to. The editors of both IGN and GameCrusher have stated that they believe the game to be, at best, a series of bugs by a sloppy programmer, and at worst, simply random stimuli. 2 The “Believers in Devin”, as they are ironically called, point to one fact to refute this claim: the game does, in fact, play. Or, more specifically, the program of the game runs. As any programmer will tell you, a program is, in many ways, a ring or a circuit, and if any part of that circuit is in disarray, the entirety of the thing ceases to function. Quadraped runs a consistent series of states, despite its irregularities– namely the title screen, the screen of game play, and the Game Over screen. These are predictable in that they always cycle in this fashion and require some input before moving onto the following state. This suggests that the program is at least complete. None of the cynics have successfully caused the game to crash. There is talk of setting up labora-tories where computers continually run one of the screens without input, with the hypothesis that if one waits long enough, the game will begin to play itself. One such attempt has begun in Michigan, and is in its twentieth day at the time of publication of this article.

If the study of Quadraped is still in its initial stages, piecing together the biography of Devin is in its infan-cy. We can say for certain that Devin Johnson was born in St. George, Utah in 1962. His father, Harold Johnson, was an air traffic controller and worked in the regional control center outside the city. It was through his father (and NASA) that Devin received his first computer. Devin’s mother, Melinda, seems to have been unemployed most of Devin’s life, whether voluntarily or not. She suffered from what seems to be Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It caused her to collect any paper she could get her hands on. 7 How affected she was by the disease during Devin’s youth is unknown, but her sister, Dorothy, reports that “it got worse with age.” “By the end of it,” she states, “She was a complete shut in. By the time she passed, the whole house was full of magazines, newspapers. Reports from Insurance Companies... [reports] for other people, I mean.... I have no idea how she got all of it.” Her problem was surely exacerbated by the death of her husband in 1980, when Devin was just under 18. Dorothy helped the two get onto disability, and, until Melinda’s death in 1986, that was the last Dorothy saw of them. Dorothy remembered Devin being “detached.” She doesn’t have much else to say about him except to note his weight—as it continued to balloon until his death— and his generally blank demeanor. At his mother’s funeral, Devin assured Dorothy that he would clean up the remnants of his mother’s obsession but turned out to never have touched any of the piles by his own death ten years later. “He was very quiet, but perfectly polite,” says Dorothy. “He worked on the computer a lot. Sent a lot of letters. I think he had some of what Melinda had. He was very particular about people coming in [to the house].” It’s believed that it was soon after his mother’s death that Devin started programming games. The first title we know of is a game called Hole Digger, which can be pretty certainly dated around 1987, a year after his mother’s death. Only reports of this and other possible Johnson games exist. Stories of this kind are–rightly–suspect. But through research done by the author, it is believed that the game is an authentic Johnson game and was available locally in Southern Utah and adjacent areas. The reports describe the game as such: A character digs a hole in the center of the screen. Every few digs an option appears. “Stop Digging? Y/N” If the character chooses yes, a “YOU WIN” screen appears followed by a “GAME OVER” screen. If the player chooses no, they continue digging again for a time and then the question reappears. The reports do not include any mention of keys or cheats, which does not preclude the possibility of them, but leaves the game and its intent rather impenetrable.

Less sure is when Devin programmed Snake Dungeon, the most reported and most studied game after Quadraped. Believed to be made within the same four year period that Quadraped is estimated to have been pro-grammed (1988- 1992), it is unknown if it was completed before or after Quadraped. Snake Dungeon has much more traditional characteristics than either Quadraped and Hole Digger. There is a main character (with a forward slash “sword”) as well as a variety of alpha- numeric demons.

Snake Dungeon has much more traditional characteristics than either Quadraped and Hole Digger. There is a main character (with a forward slash “sword”) as well as a variety of alpha ‐numeric demons. Spencer Jarvis’ account (posted on his blog “I Have A Tiresome Fire”) explains: The player moves a knight character through a series of rooms. By most accounts, the rooms are identical and all contained the same four exits—north, south, east, west. Many accounts end there, but Spencer Jarvis of Tor-rance, CA, seemed to stumble upon one of its secrets: he found a small, asterisk key. He was astonished, and tried to find the lock for it. “I worked for days, I mapped out sections of the dungeon, to make sure I wasn’t doubling back. I started to realize that the key appeared in a room that, during other attempts, it did not appear. I started trying cheat codes, cause I thought maybe it was something like that.” Spencer, he says, eventually found large story sequences.4

It is soon after making these games that Devin was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. Evidence of Johnson’s work after this time comes from scraps and bits can be attained from neighbors, family, and the people to whom Devin was so fond of mailing. One of the more interesting finds is a series of note cards written in Johnson’s hand, most likely written in 1994 or ‘95. They contain game ideas and dates which are most likely proposed completion dates (as many of the dates fall after Johnson’s death). This find suggests that Johnson’s programming plans continued until his death, if only in idea form. Some of the more interesting ones follow below: “Cracked Net. The screen is a cracked net. The player is a parrot on a perch. 08.15.94” “Evolution, the Game. The player is evolution. Game is all life forms. 07.24.98”“Egg Lander. Eggs land in ice. Everyone is afraid of what will happen when they do. 06.15.91”

In 1996, Devin died of organ failure at his home. Dorothy sold all the house belongings at an estate sale af-ter his death. Tracking down the purchasers of his keepsakes remains the primary source of information on Devin’s later life. But, as Dorothy admits, many of the discs were simply thrown out. Only a few photos of Devin exist. In one, Devin appears smiling at the camera, a gawky teenage boy in shorts. The photo seems to be commemorating the painting of the garage. In it, Devin is motioning towards the garage doors with an air of presentation. The only other photo (which is actually a few that were taken in sequence) show Devin at 24, now much heavier, at the funeral of his mother. Again he smiles into the camera, though his eyes seem a little vacant. There is no way to surmise from this gaze whether or not behind it lied the mind of a genius or a prankster. No intent can be found for why he created some of the most controversial videogames in history. All that remains in the photo are small black dots, flatly mysterious. His photos sit as evidence without context—just as impenetra-ble, alluring, and confounding as the only other evidence of this life he left: a mysterious little game called Quad-raped.

1 Super Mario Bros has the advantage of both having the most experts of any of the aforementioned games as well as a beginning with a singular start point. Other games, like Pong, which contain a random start point with each play, frustrate attempts to confirm or disprove “hidden game” theories.2 The author moves from this subject quickly not because he finds the detractors incorrect or not worth the attention. Instead, it is because the doubts are so obvious, the author assumes the reader can assemble a good list of reservations themselves without assistance 4 The most interesting of these story sequences requires the player to play the game with a specific series of moves: up, down, down, left, left, left within a 5 second interval after being motionless for at least 2 minutes of gameplay. This results in a death of the character at the hands of a tongued parenthesis demon. The GAME OVER screen appears and is followed by the Title Screen. The player must then restart the game (time interval unknown) and do the same motions in the same time frame. What results is a similar death, but this time the head of the character is removed from the body and carried by a large hand (consisting of equal signs and backslash nails) off-screen to the right. Then, through a series of screens and crude animations which would take too long to describe here, the hand takes the asterisk crown to several people, who have different reactions. One cries, another spits streams of greater-than signs, another tells a story, written in scrolling script, about an object it lost. Many people are eyeless and do not respond in any way.The last person in the sequence (which is a good deal longer than this description and is rife with repetitions) is an old man who grows a beard out of tildes and closing brackets. The beard continues to grow, filling the screen, until the player presses space bar. Then, again in scrolling script, the Old Man proclaims, “No, don’t.” Then the space bar is pressed again, and the traditional win screen appears.

Quadraped and the Games of Devin Johnson Christopher Cole

This work questions the notion of the self and explores the inability to imagine an instance or essence of it. The video utilizes a piece of literature, with a character whose name is also Stephanie, to create an indeterminacy between the fact and fiction of identity. The Borgesian Conundrum, of whether the writer writes the story or it writes him, is taken further to investigate whether the story is told by the speaker, or the speaker is told by the story. In the video, I flow in and out of fictional narrative and the self-referential, causing the work to fold back in on itself. This reflects a sense of narrative non-linearity and the idea that copying (much like the mirrors in Tlon) disseminates a visual self which is based upon a self that is already a deception itself.

Scribe TVVideo installation with sound (4:12)

Stephanie Deumer

Arenas InfinitasMaria Valentina Pelayo

“Ni el libro ni la arena tienen ni principio ni fin”-Jorge Luis Borges

A través de la lectura de la obra de Borges, el tema del infinito me llamo mucho la atención. El tema del in-finito esta claramente presente en la imaginación de Borges y lo impone a través de sus cuentos. “El universo (que otros llaman la Biblioteca) se compone de un numero indefinido, y tal vez infinito, de galerías hexagonales, con vastos pozos de ventilación en el medio, cercados por barandas bajísimas. Desde cualquier hexágono, se ven los pisos inferiores y superiores” (p.137) ...“Mi cuerpo se hundirá largamente y se corromperá y disolverá en el viento engendrado por la caida, que es infinita” (p.138; La Biblioteca de Babel). Después de leer estas frases del cuento “La Biblioteca de Babel”, la imagen de un cuerpo perdido en el espacio me hizo reflexionar sobre mi relación como ser humano, con mis alrededores, y lo minúscula que soy dentro del universo. “Si el espacio es infinito estamos en cualquier punto del espacio. Si el tiempo es infinito estamos en cualqui-er punto del tiempo. […] Hay Sorteos impersonales, de propósito indefinido: uno decreta que se arroje a las aguas del Eufrates un zafiro de Taprobana; otro, que desde el techo de una torre se suelte un pájaro; otro, que cada siglo se retire (o se añada) un grano de arena de los innumerables que hay en la playa. Las consecuencias son, a veces, terribles”(pg.129; La lotería de Babilonia). ¿Por qué Borges escribió sobre arena? La arena es incontable y mientras el diccionario la define como un “conjunto de partículas desagregadas de las rocas y acumuladas en las orillas de los mares, los ríos o en capas de los terrenos de acarreo” para mí continúa siendo un misterio. Como dice Borges, La arena al igual que el infinito, no tiene ni principio ni fin. Después de leer los cuentos que me hicieron reflexionar sobre el infinito, la arena se con-virtió en un recurso de inspiración para mi, para crear un obra de arte/instalación inspirada en el tema del infinito y como lo percibo a través de la literatura de Borges. Al igual que en el infinito, en el mundo del arte no existen limites. Planeo usar arenas y espejos como los materiales principales para producir esta obra. Ambos materiales son mencionados constantemente en los cuentos de Borges. La instalación que se titula “Arenas Infinitas” consiste en tres piezas; empezando por dos peceras de vidrio. “La luna es del mismo color que la arena infinita” (El Inmor-tal). Dentro de ambas peceras, hay arenas de diferentes colores, cada color divido por papel, y así se crea dentro de cada pecera una composición abstracta. El tercer elemento que constituye la Instalación es una proyección de arena cayéndose que sera proyectada entre las dos peceras. Así, la proyección de arena dará la ilusión de caerse dentro de la pecera. También integro espejos simétricos en la instalación. “La linea consta de un numero infinito de puntos; el plano, de un numero infinito de lineas; el volumen, de un numero infinito de planos; el hipervolumen, de un numero infinito de volúmenes” (Pg.506; El libro de Arena). Mi meta es, como me transmitió Borges con su literatura, transmitirle al observador la sensación de infinito, y recordarle a ella/el que nosotros como humanos somos un grano que constituye la arena.

This is a work of art/installation inspired by the theme of the infinite which I relate to my reading Jorge Luis Borg-es’s work. I use sand and mirrors as the main materials. Both elements are constantly mentioned in Borges stories. The installation is made of three pieces: two glass tanks and one projection. There is one glass tank hanged against the wall on the top, and one at the bottom, the projection screened against the wall between both tanks. The tanks contain differently colored sand and is separated with paper inside the tank, creating an abstract composition. I also integrate mirror pieces in the piece. The projection consists of a repeated sequence of sand falling, creating a visual effect of sand falling constantly. The total measurement of the piece is about 5’4 feet tall and 3’feet wide. My goal in to transmit to the viewer the feeling of the infinite, and to remind him/her that we as humans are each of us a grain of sand within the universe.

Having recently moved to Northern California, I am daily navigating the new and weaving it together with the old to mitigate my sense of displacement. In an attempt to reconcile various “homes,” there is a definite confusion and creative reimagining – an oneiric quality as memory and the present meld and shape one another. Frequently, places may overlap or even be “replaced;” an instance of acclimation in the cycles of one’s life. With this video, Unconscionable Maps (quoted from Borges’ “On Exactitude in Science,” a tale of obsessive cartography covering a land in equal ratio maps), I convey that confusion and interchangeability.

The Borges works most consistently on my mind are the short story “On Exactitude in Science” (1946), the poem “Mirrors” (1960), and the lecture “Blindness” (1977). Lately, obsessive ruminations of “The Circular Ruins” (1940) have been pervasive as well. I am drawn to how these four in particular focus on the unknown or perceived un-known – the conquering of it, the embracing of it, and the inherent knowledge and cyclical creation of it. In the case of “The Circular Ruins,” in which a man is dreamt and created by another as he himself does the same, the ideas of intangible influence and the power to create one’s world are particularly relevant.

The confused cartographies in Unconscionable Maps are my own, collected within the past year and a half from or of modes of transportation, sites of established or forming homes, or places where I feel some part of me was discovered (as in a circular ruin). The overlapping audio and visuals (not necessarily synched with their correct partners) speak to the residual nature of previous experiences in our lives, specifically during periods of transition. As with much of Borges’ work, the acceptance and appreciation for losing and gaining in equal measure is central to this piece. The representation of memories interacting with the present emerges as a portrayal of Borgesian cy-cles, simultaneous realities, displacement, and recreation.

Unconscionable MapsMegan Broughton

“I did not think that I had returned upstream on the supposed waters of Time; rather I suspected that I was the possessor of a reticent or absent sense of the inconceivable word eternity.”

—A New Refutation of Time, Borges

Borges’ exploration of the infinite, his disregard for linear time, creates flourishing, labyrinthine frames, through which his readers can access non—linear time. To attempt to come in contact with eternity is to attempt to access the inaccessible. The art object that leads us through the doors of perception into the imperceivable must create an opening for us to access the void, nothingness. In order to lay bare the unseeable, it is necessary to create gaps, silences, emptiness in order to expunge that which is hidden. The void must be framed.

Overwhelming the senses is filling an empty cup so full that it is a drowning space, drowning the perception of the participant, transforming emptiness to fullness to emptiness. We experience art through the emergence and submergence of our own experience of the void, “Not only does fullness come into actuality from emptiness (or fail to come into actuality by remaining within emptiness); it is by virtue of emptiness—and through emptiness by hollowing—opening wide—that fullness can ceaselessly produce its ‘full effect’”.1

My frame is the complete inundation of the senses. This piece is an installation, a performance piece, an interactive sound sculpture, and an interactive video sculpture. My intention is to draw in the audience, one at a time, and invite them to duck into a low tunnel. A Microsoft Kinect tracks the viewer’s body, that data controls the 8 speak-ers that line the tunnel, and also controls the movement of the projections, which frame the end of the tunnel. At the end of the tunnel sits a faceless, Marian figure, holding a bowl of water. As the viewer approaches the faceless figure, the sound closes in around the viewer’s head, and the projections intensify into a dazzling ring of lights. She washes the hands of the viewers. The viewers subsequent retreat from her destroys the image and destroys the sound. By washing hands, I am intending to pierce through the overwhelming experience around the viewer’s body with a physically grounding sensation. As soon as the water connects with the hands, it shatters the normal perceptual boundaries of art-viewing; contact is made.

Furthermore, I am exploring the symbolic identity of the Virgen de Guadalupe that has emerged out of colonized Mexico. “The Aztecs ... had an elaborate, coherent symbolic system for making sense of their lives. When this was destroyed by the Spaniards, something new was needed to fill the void and make sense of New Spain ... the image of Guadalupe served that purpose.” 2 Guadalupe is a non-white vision of Mary, an indigenous goddess transformed, recognized by the Catholic church. Mary is regarded so highly that some instances of Catholicism border on being a Marian cult. Worshipping a female deity is fully outside Christian doctrine, women being a manifestation of ‘Other’. Guadalupe, being an indigenous Mary, is an embraced ‘Other’ outside of Western European Christianity, a symbol of non-judgement and unconditional motherly love, of a filled cup.

1 Francois Jullien2 Patricia Harrington

InninantzinSuzanne Kite

“At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos.”

From “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Labyrinths, p. 8.