Hex from the libraryofbabel.info
Ownership is not the same thing as credit. Courts of law may ask who owns this place, idea, work of art. Large corporations will spend mightily to enforce intellectual ownership of media like movies or music. But, in the matters of legacy and history, credit for a thing is what people value. In this, we have two ways to bestow credit. Those are the title of artist and the explorer - the former creates art and the latter discovers things. However, if we think of ideas as being things that exist independently of their creation, then the artist becomes nothing more than an explorer.
Artists and Explorers
The artist might create a painting. She will apply brush strokes of a certain color and texture. After sufficient time and effort, she will declare that the work is complete. Standing before her, she observes the result of her labor: art. But what makes this collection of parts ‘art’? The canvas was purchased from someone else. The paint came from a plastic tube. As separate components, the paint and canvas are fungible – identical to any paint or canvas that you might find at any store. But the artist, with her skill and experience, can produce a masterpiece many times more valuable than the receipt she composed from shopping. Art, for our purposes, must be something more than the sum of its parts. The final value of the art is purely reliant on the notoriety and skill of the artist. The value is inseparable from the artist.
On the other hand, the explorer ventures out into the world. He has neither canvas nor paint – not even a brush. What he does have are his legs for moving and eyes for experiencing. When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492, he ‘discovered’ the land. Of course, his discovery is only a euro-centric framing – America was long occupied by a native population. Nevertheless, neither Columbus, nor the native Americans, created the land upon which they laid claim. We don’t remember Magellan for digging Magellan’s pass. We judge the explorer by the thing they claim to have found. This thing is entirely natural – the authorship can only be attributed to God or the Universe. Ironically, the explorer can never truly claim ownership over what they have found. Without the explorer, islands, caves, mountains, and entire continents would still persist – they are dissociable from the explorer.
The Artist is the Explorer
From a novice perspective, we may find the artist to be the polar opposite to the explorer. The artist creates while the explorer discovers. The author versus the reader. However, from another perspective, the artist can be thought of as an assembler. Just as the explorer might require skill and grit to traverse through difficult terrain, the artist requires skill to find an assembling of the ingredients that pleases. When the explorer reaches the end of the trail and finds that location or thing, we might say that the artist does much the same. The artist has only discovered an assembling of parts that produce a greater whole – a thing.
Taking credit from the artist may feel wrong to some. Many will argue that the creativity of the artist separates them from the explorer. However, we feel this intrinsically. Does the author of your favorite novel truly own the feeling you experience when reading? No, the artist may try their best to imbue the work with a message - however the reader will interpret the work as they please. The separation of the author from their work is not a new idea. However, we can extend the idea to ask not just about the meaning of the text, but also whether we may better call the author an explorer rather than an artist.
If we imagine a construction by which a novel is a mere collection of words – plucked from a random consortment of letters and punctuation – then the author has simply ‘discovered’ an ordering of those letters and punctuation that pleases the reader. Rather than a physical space that the explorer must journey, the author must journey a metaphysical space. Like our own world, this literary space is mostly filled with junk and mundanity. As the author explores, they will find everything that could possibly be written down. They will find the phone book, twenty-thousand letter Ps, Hamlet, and even all the fury fan fiction ever published to the internet. When the artist finds the assortment they were looking for, they channel the metaphysical world into the real world by typing or writing it down. In this way, they have simply discovered a thing – the assortment of words – and not a work of art.
Library of Babel
Let’s take every word that I have written before this section – we will reference it as a basis several times. Individually, they are meaningless. However, if we place them together, they produce a clear thesis or idea. Similarly, we might say that all the words existed before in a physical sense – each of them can be found in some book or dictionary. However, even though I assembled the words as the author, what if I told you there was a place where they’ve always existed? The assembling of words have always existed for any one to find.
We call this place the Library of Babel. Rather than having a physical address, this library exists entirely on the internet. Unlike other popular online libraries, the words in these books are not saved in some database. Using math, all the books are generated on the fly using a computer algorithm. The same seed will produce the same book. While most books are random or uninteresting, occasionally you will find a stray word or phrase. If you search even longer, you may find something funny or engaging. Additionally, the site has a reverse search option. This means, you can take the words from this essay, and find the book which contains them: https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?d_pxboksxqpvdivlozjha309.
Anyone could have navigated through the halls, shelves, and novels of the library to find this post. Since the library existed before I started this blog, all my posts can be considered as preceding my publication. Of course, the aesthetic of a library is only a facade that the site utilizes as a metaphor. Behind the curtain, it simply wraps a mathematical algorithm for generating sequences of letters. Still, it does materialize the metaphysical literary forest I referenced earlier. Rather than being some abstract concept, we can observe it in practice.
Conclusion
The blurred separation of the artist from the explorer relies solely on how “real” the metaphysical space is. Before the advent of the computer age, it was not possible to produce algorithms capable of generating text. However, with the Library of Babel, this abstract literary space can become connected physically to the real world. We cannot ignore this reality.
With the advent of AI assistive tools like ChatGPT, the line between creation and discovery blurs even more still. Can we say that someone who used ChatGPT to translate a list of ideas into a finished work to have been the author of that work? What if they only asked ChatGPT to proof read? Just like the Library of Babel, we may consider both these technologies to be black boxes. Practicality aside, you can search both to find collections of text that may become a book - a thing to be called art. Who then would we claim to be the artist?
For me, at least, the separation of the artist and the explorer is only a thought that pesters at the back of my mind. I needed to write it down, otherwise no one may understand my worry. Am I creating value when I write? Or am I simply just a vessel to channel real creativity from beyond myself?