What would happen if Borges had written a book lost on the blockchain?

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the most admired and studied writers of the 20th century. His work is characterized by his erudition, his imagination and his exploration of themes such as time, infinity, the labyrinth, dreams and literature. Borges created fantastic and metaphysical worlds, where reality and fiction are confused and questioned.

But what would happen if Borges had written a book lost on the blockchain? What kind of texts would he have generated? What secrets would he have revealed? What riddles would he have posed?

These are some of the questions that Another Writing for the Other Side, an NFT project based on Borges' literary work, attempts to answer. It is a series of texts generated by artificial intelligence, which imitate Borges' style and themes, and which are presented as fragments of a lost book. Each text is unique and unrepeatable, and is stored on the Ethereum blockchain.

The project was created by Argentine artist Federico Joselevich Puiggrós, who was inspired by Borges's fascination with automatic writing, chance and intertextuality. The artist used a language model called GPT-3, which is capable of producing coherent and creative texts from an input. The artist gave the model a series of keywords related to Borges, such as “labyrinth”, “library”, “mirror”, “dream”, “tiger”, “Aleph”, etc. The model, then, generated texts that combined these words with literary, philosophical, historical and mythological references, thus creating a Borgesian work in the digital age.

The result is surprising and captivating. The texts in Another Writing for the Other Side seem to have come from the pen of Borges, but at the same time they have their own and original voice. The texts invite us to enter a universe of infinite possibilities, where nothing is what it seems and everything can be something else. The texts challenge us to decipher their hidden meanings, their cryptic allusions, their wordplay and their paradoxes. The texts make us feel the emotion of reading Borges, but also that of discovering something new and different.

Another Writing for the Other Side is an NFT project that is not only a work of art, but also a tribute to Borges and his legacy. The project demonstrates that Borges' literature is still current and relevant in the 21st century, and that the blockchain can be a space for literary creation and experimentation. The project also raises a reflection on authorship, originality and intellectual property in the digital age. Who is the true author of these texts? The artist, the model or Borges? What value does a work that is generated randomly and that can be replicated infinitely have? What does it mean to buy and own a fragment of a lost book on the blockchain?
These are some of the questions that Another Writing for the Other Side leaves us, an NFT project that is based on the literary work of Borges. A project that shows us that literature is an endless adventure, and that blockchain is a new territory to explore