June 25, 2003

Aleph-one: Borges and Digital Art

by Nick Montfort · , 3:11 am

My friend Martín Hadis has just written and coded up a new site on the life and works of Jorge Luis Borges. (Martín is coeditor of Borges Profesor, a collection of Borges’s lectures on English literature.) The new site is available in Spanish and English, offers not only bibliographical information but also a Web directory and suggestions on how to begin reading Borges’s stories and poems – and it should continue to grow in the future, hopefully to incorporate more information about Borges’s influence in the digital realm.

Yes, there are some good Borges resources in English out there already, but this extensive site, with everything from syllabi to continually-updated news, looks to be quite nice. And what better excuse to mention that Borges has inspired almost innumerable works of digital art? There’s hypertext fiction – Stuart’s “forking paths” and Victory Garden are two well-known examples that riff on Borges to a greater and lesser extent; there are several dozen other examples out there, based on several stories. There are other sorts of based-on-Borges or Borges-inspired digital works, ranging from Library-of-Babel-like exhaustive programs to Simon Biggs’s Babel to The Intruder, Natalie Bookchin’s art game. Borges has even been linked to Riven. There was certainly a reason that Noah and I chose a story of his to kick off the New Media Reader. I don’t have the energy now to begin a lengthy essay about how my readings of Borges have influenced my work (having just finished proofreading my book), but I’ll invite any of you to at least comment on that, if you like, or to share your thoughts about Martín’s site. Feel free to fill in any of the numerous Borges-inspired works on the Web that I’ve missed, also!

3 Responses to “Aleph-one: Borges and Digital Art”


  1. Alan DeNiro Says:

    Might have already come across this, but Borges even finds himself in a tech column about firewalls:

    http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/161

  2. random items Says:
    just a kiddy test :: borges und trackback :-)
    [>] [url=http://grandtextauto.org/]grandtextauto[/url] sammelt webseiten zu [url=http://steel.lcc.gatech.edu/grandtextauto/archives/000039.html]jorge luis borges[/url]. und das soll jetzt einfach mal ein trackback …

  3. William P. Wend Says:

    Wow I had never seen this site before the post just came up due to the Xanax spam! Thanks Xanax spammer for bringing this post back up in the comment RSS feed. Heh.

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