Click a shelf to select it. Double-click to view it alone.
Keys: ← → step, R picks a random shelf.
| Shelf no. | |
|---|---|
| Picture no. | |
| Lightness | |
| Hue | |
| Symmetry | |
| Busyness |
| Hexagon | |
|---|---|
| Wall | |
| Shelf | |
| Frame | |
| Shelf no. |
Each hexagon has four walls of five shelves, and each shelf holds 32 pictures: 640 to a hexagon. The two open sides lead to the neighboring hexagons, and the shaft in the middle drops you somewhere at random.
At coarse sizes the pace stops at 3 shelves a second, so large areas of the screen do not flash.
| Shelf | 0 |
|---|---|
| Shelves in all | |
| Time to show them all |
Every shelf in this archive has been shown. The procession has started again from shelf 0.
| Color | |
|---|---|
| Time to show them all |
All 16,777,216 web colors in an order shuffled for this visit. The strip shows the last 48. The pace stops at 3 colors a second so the page does not flash.
Pinacotheca of Babel is a re-creation of Jonathan Basile's Babel Image Archives (2015), which carried Jorge Luis Borges's story “The Library of Babel” (1941) from books into pictures. Every picture that fits a format is on a shelf: every photograph ever taken at that size, every one never taken, and every page of text small enough to read. Almost all of it is noise.
The original format is 640 × 416 pixels in 4,096 colors. Sizes run down to 2 × 2 and colors down to black and white. Each combination is its own archive with its own shelf numbers. The smallest are small enough to see whole: 4 × 4 in black and white has 65,536 shelves, and the Catalogue shows every one of them.
A 640 × 416 picture is 266,240 pixels of 12 bits, a string of 3,194,880 bits. A shelf number is the same length. Each archive is a fixed, reversible scramble between the two: a Feistel network in which each half of the string is mixed with pseudo-random bits seeded from the other half. Change one digit of a shelf number and about half the picture changes. Run the scramble backwards and any picture gives up its shelf number exactly, which is what Search does. The scramble is this site's own, so a shelf number opens a different picture here than on the original.
A shelf number is as long as the picture it names, up to 961,755 digits. Finding a picture here takes the same information as making it, so the archive gives back only what a visitor brings. Browsing at random will not turn up a recognizable picture: even the roughly 10120 operations the observable universe could have performed since the Big Bang (Lloyd, Physical Review Letters 88, 2002) cover a vanishing fraction of the shelves.
| Picture size | 640 × 416 = 266,240 pixels |
|---|---|
| Colors | 4,096 (16 levels each of red, green and blue) |
| Bits per picture | 3,194,880 |
| Shelves | 4,096266,240 ≈ 5.16 × 10961,754 |
| Longest shelf number | 961,755 digits |
The pages follow two references from the early web: Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think (New Riders, 2000) for the site ID, tabs and page names, and Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton's Web Style Guide, 2nd edition (Yale University Press, 2002) for the 760-pixel page, Verdana and Georgia, line length, and the header and footer. Every color on the page comes from the 216-color browser-safe palette, and each of them is also one of the archive's 4,096.
Original: Babel Image Archives and The Library of Babel by Jonathan Basile, after Jorge Luis Borges, “La biblioteca de Babel” (1941). Pinacotheca of Babel is built by myceliation. The source code is published under the Viral Public License. The curve in Sort and Catalogue follows Jakub Červený's generalized Hilbert curve, gilbert2d.