Speculative Archives in an Age of Digital Uncertainty
Published on Vantage Art Projects
Jennifer Mawby and The Library of Babel: Speculative Archives in an Age of Digital Uncertainty.
By Hewitt Callister.
Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel (1941) is a nightmare of knowledge—an infinite archive where every possible book exists, yet meaning itself is lost in the sheer chaos of it all. The librarians, trapped in this abyss of possibility, search for coherence in randomness, constructing grand theories even as the library defies understanding. It’s a story about the futility of certainty in the face of excess, and if that doesn’t sum up our digital age, I don’t know what does.
Jennifer Mawby’s work operates in this same space of paradox. Her practice interrogates the instability of historical narratives, the failures of archives, and the distortions of digital technology. Mawby is less interested in reconstructing the past than in reminding us how fragmented and unreliable it always was to begin with. Her sculptures, ceramics, and AI-generated artifacts resemble speculative codices—half-deciphered manuscripts, mythological relics, historical records corrupted by time and technology alike. They reference ancient knowledge systems—Sumerian cuneiform, medieval illuminated texts, early printing—while embedding digital aesthetics, glitches, and distortions that call attention to how information is filtered, controlled, and inevitably lost. Like Borges’ infinite library, her work suggests that knowledge is never fixed. It’s always shifting, always slipping away.
Digital Archives and AI as a Flawed Librarian
The Library of Babel is, in many ways, a premonition of the internet—an endless repository where meaningful information is buried beneath an avalanche of garbage, repetition, and noise. But Borges’ vision is also an eerie precursor to AI, which plays the role of librarian in our digital labyrinth. Mawby takes this further, integrating AI-generated imagery into her practice, using machine-learning algorithms to hallucinate speculative artifacts—blueprints of history that never existed.
There’s something both brilliant and unsettling about this. AI, like Borges’ library, promises total knowledge while delivering pure disorientation. Its outputs are unpredictable, arbitrary, and prone to distortion—echoing the plight of Borges’ librarians, who comb through meaningless texts in search of pattern, of truth. The way Mawby incorporates AI feels akin to the work of Trevor Paglen, who exposes the biases and failures built into machine-learning systems (Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You), 2016), or Hito Steyerl, whose essay The Wretched of the Screen (2012) dissects the instability of digital images. Mawby positions AI as a deeply unreliable historian—one that exposes the inherent fragility of archives rather than reinforcing their authority.
The Cosmic Egg and the Myth of Absolute Knowledge
Borges’ library contains a hypothetical Book of Truth—a single volume that explains the entire system, if only it could be found. This longing for a singular, all-encompassing truth is an old one, appearing across cultures and mythologies. Mawby’s use of the cosmic egg—a motif drawn from Hindu, Orphic, and Chinese creation myths—taps into this same desire for completeness. But in her hands, the egg is always fractured, incomplete. There is no final revelation, no ultimate knowledge—only fragments, ruins, and remnants of lost stories.
Her approach resonates with Marguerite Humeau’s speculative archaeology—recreating extinct species, lost languages, vanished civilizations (Echoes, 2015; FOXP2, 2016). Like Humeau, Mawby understands that history is less about truth and more about reconstruction, more about the story we tell than any definitive record. The fragmented figure, the mask—recurring motifs in Mawby’s work—reinforce this idea. Her sculptures resemble ancient reliquaries eroded by time, artifacts that exist in a liminal space between history and fiction. Artists like Huma Bhabha (We Come in Peace, 2018) and Matthew Monahan (Cross of the Convert, 2011), who work with fragmented, totemic figures, similarly explore how history is written and rewritten through layers of destruction and reconstruction.
Searching for Meaning in an Infinite Archive
The Library of Babel is ultimately a warning about the limits of human understanding. We imagine knowledge as something we can collect, contain, control—but Borges reminds us that too much information is just as paralyzing as too little. Mawby’s work plays with this same tension, existing in the space between preservation and loss, between documentation and distortion. Her sculptures are speculative relics—objects that could be from the past, could be from the future, but are never fully of the present.
In an era where deepfakes, algorithmic bias, and AI-generated misinformation complicate our relationship with the archive, Mawby’s work forces us to reconsider what we think we know. History isn’t static. It isn’t fixed. It’s a constant act of excavation and reinterpretation, forever shifting under our feet. Like Borges’ librarians, we may never find the one book that explains it all—but in Mawby’s world, the fragments and distortions left behind might be the more interesting story anyway.
References
Borges, J. L. (1941). The Library of Babel.
Paglen, T. (2016). Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You). The New Inquiry.
Steyerl, H. (2012). The Wretched of the Screen. e-flux Journal.
Humeau, M. (2015). Echoes. Palais de Tokyo.
Humeau, M. (2016). FOXP2. Nottingham Contemporary.
Bhabha, H. (2018). We Come in Peace. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Monahan, M. (2011). Cross of the Convert. Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin.
About the writer: Hewitt Callister is a retired teacher, painter, and reclusive critic known for his sharp, contrarian takes on contemporary art. Born in Toronto in 1956, he spent decades teaching before retreating to his Montreal loft, where he paints, writes, and mentors a select few.