The Skeleton Library - by René Walter - GOOD INTERNET

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The Skeleton Library<br>On Interpolatable Archives, Part 1: Compulsions to Connect, Warburg, Borges and Goldsmith, Cultural Technologies and Digital Oralities<br>May 11, 2026

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I’ve been throwing around the term “Interpolatable Archives” for quite some time when talking about Language Models and Artificial Intelligence, and I finally got around to write down what I mean by that. It got a bit out of hand, and I had to split up this essay into four parts, all of which will be published in the coming days.<br>Here’s an overview of what’s to come:<br>Part 1: The Skeleton Library - Compulsions to Connect, Warburg, Borges and Goldsmith, Cultural Technologies and Digital Oralities<br>Part 2: Explosion Drawings - Science Sans Discoveries, Textrotating Cognitive Catalysts and Exploding Your Intelligence by the Method of Warburg<br>Part 3: Pitfalls of Probability - Accelerations, Anachronisms, Wishfulfillments, Severances and Homogenizations<br>Part 4: The House of Polly - Useless Bullshit, Meaning Of The Poetic Kind, Sloptimizations, Thinking In Vacuums, Remainder Criticisms and Games of Chess<br>Here’s the whole essay in one final version of 14k words , tracing the history of fuzzy archives back to Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne Atlas and Borges and goes on to explain the various effects on learning, including chances and risks, and dissects various points of critique from delusions to parrots, some of which prevail, many of which vanish, once you strip AI from cognitive woo.<br>There’s a “sloppy version” too featuring all the image synthesis generations which i like quite a lot, but i get why these rub some people the wrong way.

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“I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am.<br>The books are not yet on the shelves,<br>not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.”<br>(Walter Benjamin)

Compulsions to Connect

One hundred years ago, a german scholar named Aby Warburg went mad over what he called his “Verknüpfungszwang”, a compulsion to connect. He was searching for instances of what he called “Pathosformel“, aesthetic commonalities in the expressions of human emotional states — joy and rage, grief or ecstasy — through cultural history.<br>To achieve his goal, he built the initial Warburg Institute1 in Hamburg where he collected art, books, news snippets and artifacts. For his opus magnum of the Mnemosyne Atlas (”Bilderatlas Mnemosyne“ in german), he displayed a collection of 971 artifacts on 63 large panels, each two meters high, and indexed them not by the usual meta data like genre, author, date, or topic, but by idiosynratic aesthetic categories and psychological, affective intensity. Here’s some of the labels by which he sorted this collection: “Different degrees in the application of the cosmic system to mankind”, “Orientalizing of antique images”, “Development from Greek cosmology to Arab practice”, “Rimini pneumatic conception of the spheres as opposed to the fetishistic conception” or “Cosmology in Dürer”.

Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne Atlas, detail from panels 79, 45 and 46<br>With the Mnemosyne Atlas, an associative image-based map of meaning, Warburg aimed at what he called an “iconology of intervals”, where meaning through analysis of images doesn’t emerge from historic context, but from the space inbetween associated but otherwise unrelated, anachronistic images. His associative Bilderatlas can be read as an early prototype of the latent space of an image model, whichs output was the “Pathosformel”, averaged primitives of affect expressed across cultural history. 100 years later this kind of navigation of an idea space would be newly theorized in context of machine learning by Peli Grietzer in his Theory of Vibes, which, to him, are cognitive maps allowing us to interpret experiences through lossy compression of holistic patterns.<br>Aby Warburgs’ project of the Mnemosyne Atlas remained unfinished, he died in 1929 from a heart attack. Today, his archive resides in the Warburg Institute in London.<br>12 years after Warburgs’ death, Jorge Luis Borges published a collection of shortstories called ”The Garden of forking Paths”. It contains at least two stories of interest to our cause, about at least one of which you surely must have heard: ”The Library of Babel” consists of books of 410 pages, containing all possible combinations of 22 letters2 plus period, comma, and spacing. That fictional library includes the random and nonsensical aswell as the meaningful, it holds “the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of the true catalogue, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language”. It contains a book telling the exact story of your life, and...