By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters

ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, PT. 2, SEC. II, MEM. I

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At the beginning of Library of Babel (1941), Jorge Luis Borges teases us with an epigraph. The first words we read before we dive into his infinite library of hexagonal rooms - ""By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters”  - seem to undo the very structure of his library before it's even been erected.

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One would be forgiven for thinking those 23 letters constitute the alphabet used in this quixotic library. Like much with Borges', it's not quite so simple. Those 23 letters refer to the 17th century Christian Latin alphabet, which contrasts with both the 22 letter alphabet used inside Borges' Library of Babel and the 27 letters of the Spanish alphabet in which he originally published the short story. When do you play a game with three sets of rules?

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If alphabets are the coding primitives of humanity, Jorge Luis Borges is a semantic archaeologist, turning our attention to that which exists beneath the semiotics of language that we often take for granted: letters, characters, glyphs, graphemes and their unending variations.

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Deception and encryption, order and chaos, sense and nonsense, the finite and infinite abound in Borges' Library of Babel. And so they do in our contemporary moment. Coding languages compete with traditional alphabets, hallucinating Als compete with humans, centralized systems of meaning making now have to contend with the current virality of decentralized structures. History is being remade, truth is untrusted. Characters are being rearranged in unending structures.

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One of the first institutional solo NFT exhibitions in Europe and the world- Robert Alice's BABEL at the Monnaie de Paris is an exercise in reimagining this Borgesian drama for the contemporary moment. It takes as its starting point the site-specific context of France's oldest institution, the national mint, and places that 1200 year history in dialogue with radically new decentralized philosophies - ones only 14 years old. Alice's exhibition is a specific investigation of the aesthetics of centralisation and decentralization.

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It is a discussion, both abstract and narrative, of the competing philosophies of state anD crypto networks and how potentially these may exist (or not) in the future. Of systems of ornamentation set against the strict minimalism of modernism. Of the 'stability' of the physical set against the 'instability of the digital. It is specifically rooted in crypto history, and yet the roads the audience can travel after encountering these works are many. The histories of cryptography,libertarianism, and privacy in the case of Babel (2023) and the Reprints (2023), the nature of abstraction and history painting as contrasted between The Blueprints (2023) and Ornament and Crisis (2023). The relationship between the fragment and the whole in Portraits of a Mind  (2019) and The Fragments (2023) . And yet these various projects, created over the last five years are united by a singular point of departure - characters. Characters reimagined into everchanging compositions - recontextualising codes and colliding histories together. Characters that seek to the blueprints of meaning. Characters that suggest the primacy of text to blockchain and the wider digital cultural ecosystem in which NFTs operate. In Borges' Babel he writes, ""There is no combination of characters one can make dhemrichtdi; for example - that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. Much like for Borges, in Alice's work characters are not just characters but protagonists.

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STUDIO ROBERT ALICE

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Robert Alice

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PROJECT MANAGER

Cosmo Lindsay

HEAD OF RESEARCH AND PRODUCTION

Leila Lawrance

BLOCKCHAIN DEVELOPMENT

Oliver Sepsik

Karim Guettache

VR TECHNICIAN

Andrei Nastasia

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MONNAIE DE PARIS

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CHAIRMAN AND CEO

Marc Schwartz

CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT OFFICER

Catherine Monlouis-Félicité

HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS CURATOR

Dominique Antérion

HEAD OF CULTURAL AND EDUCATIVE PROGRAMS

Stéphanie Molinard

EXHIBITION MANAGER

Anne Guillemet

PRODUCTION ASSISTANT

Margaux Palud

ARTWORK REGISTRAR

Pernille Soldat-Saiz Caceres

TECHNICAL REGISTRAL

Julien Landais

DIGITAL CONTENT MANAGER

Barbara Aubineau

STAGIAIRE INTERN

Alice Giraud

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LACOLLECTION

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CEO AND CO-FONDER

Jean-Sébastien Beaucamps

HEAD CURATOR

Marlene Corbun

CHIEF OF STAFF

Adrien Bellamy

INTERN CURATOR

Marie Laroche

PHOTO CREDITS

Museum collection

© MONNAIE DE PARIS

Exhibition installation

© AURELIEN MOLE

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