Panoptic Machine

Jorge Luis Borges explored the concepts of infinity, time, space, and human knowledge in numerous works. One of his most famous short stories is “The Library of Babel” (“La biblioteca de Babel”). In this story, he describes a vast library containing every possible 410-page book—encompassing every thought that could ever occur to us, every story we could ever tell, but also books where the text is meaningless, with characters arranged randomly.

The idea of deriving knowledge from systematic or random combinations of letters was not only examined by Borges. Claude Shannon studied the information content of randomly generated texts from an information theory perspective. In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a machine in Laputa mixes all possible words and expressions. Software artist Scott Saunders created visual, pixel-based versions of this concept in programs where a generated animation progresses from a black screen to white, pixel by pixel. Although this idea can be told in a few words, we have been fascinated for years by the desire to better understand its scale, impossibility, and simplicity—to delve into it—even though documented versions of similar works already exist.

For the Thought Festival, mathematician Zsuzsa Weiner and I created an interactive interpretation of this idea that others have envisioned before. In our installation, we enable a journey through all images built from a 128 x 72-pixel grid using a palette of 1,000 colors. We control the machine with a red sphere along this seemingly infinite but actually finite and computable timeline. If we turn it to just the right point, we might see the date of our birth or death, the formation of a supernova, or the lint that will drift past the window tomorrow. Although these images are just a few minutes of scrolling away, it’s impossible to find them among the unfathomable amount of noise.

It’s an interesting feeling to look and imagine that if we observed each image for an attosecond, even over the lifespan of the universe, we could only view the 6 x 3-pixel images with 100 colors. If we wanted to scroll through all the 6 x 4-pixel images with 100 colors within the universe’s existence, we would need to distribute the images among a trillion people. To see all the 128 x 72-pixel images with 1,000 colors from the project, we would have to observe them unimaginably longer to see each one.

To navigate this enormous series of images, we use a red sphere. We numbered the 1,000 colors from 000 to 999—black is 000, turquoise is 287, and white is 999. Then we sequentially go through all 9,216 pixels of each image and write down the corresponding three-digit color codes one after another. This way, each image corresponds to a number: the completely black image is all zeros, and the completely white image is a number consisting of 9,216 x 3 = 27,648 nines. By moving the red sphere, we traverse along the number line from 000…0 to 999…9, and the image corresponding to the current number appears on the projector.

By moving the sphere left and right, we step forward and backward along this number line, but we adjust how quickly we move by scrolling the sphere up and down to get closer to or further from the number line. When we scroll the sphere all the way up, we can get so close that moving left or right corresponds to increasing or decreasing the color code of just the last pixel. If we scroll the sphere downward, we step back from the number line, so moving along it happens in larger units. In this case, we observe that left-right movements change the colors of pixels in the lower part of the image.

On the number line, most numbers correspond to meaningless noise; however, we have selected a few numbers whose corresponding images are meaningful. The machine shows us these images randomly, independently of our actions. We can then continue our journey from these points, only to once again encounter noise with overwhelming probability.

Ádám Somlai-Fischer
Startup founder, media artist, musician

Co-founder of the presentation platform Prezi, which has 150 million users worldwide. His artistic works have been showcased at venues including the Venice Architecture Biennale, Transmediale in Berlin, NTT/ICC in Tokyo, and Kiasma in Helsinki.

In addition to numerous Hungarian publications, his work has been featured in Wired Magazine, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Fast Company, Forbes, and CNN. His interdisciplinary work has earned him multiple awards: he was listed among the Financial Times’ Europe’s top 50 tech entrepreneurs, won the World Technology Award (WTN, Time Inc) in the Arts category, worked as an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and was selected as one of the fifty most promising designers by International Design magazine. He served as Hungary’s Ambassador of Talent. He was a founder of the Kitchen Budapest innovation lab, the Bridge Budapest NGO, and the Budapest School.

He studies music and jazz improvisation under Gábor Juhász.
www.somlai-fischer.com/adam

Zsuzsa Weiner
Mathematician, MTA-ELTE Research Group in Geometric and Algebraic Combinatorics

Education and Degrees:
2003, Ph.D. in Theoretical Mathematics (“summa cum laude”), Eötvös Loránd University.

Employment:
2001–2003: Ericsson Hungary, Research Laboratory
2002–2005: MTA Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics
2009–present: Prezi.com and MTA-ELTE Geometric and Algebraic Research Group

Professional Awards and Honors:
2003: Grünwald Award, J. Bolyai Mathematical Society
2005–2006: Magyary Zoltán Postdoctoral Fellowship

Conferences:
Presented at numerous international conferences, including three as an invited keynote speaker (2018 in Italy, 2023 in Turkey, and 2023 in the Netherlands).

Publications:
32 foreign-language publications in international, refereed journals.