The Current State of Knowledge

Part of an ongoing project to catalogue what it is that we don't know

This is a 'pataphysical experiment that seeks to fill in gaps in knowledge. Knowledge, in this case, is defined by things that are indexed in Google, and locations of lack in epistemology according to this system are those Google searches that return zero results. This Chrome extension automatically takes note of these searches and adds them to an online record (don't worry, the program can only see failed searches and cannot connect said searches to any particular IP address or person). The resulting document will serve as both poem and catalogue, and in hosting the list on the web, future Google searches for the same queries will have somewhere to point. In addition to the 'pataphysical public service that my project will fill, it will also acknowledge and amplify the biases of language – an ancillary consequence of defining what we don't know not through meaning but through semantic expression (the catalogue does not care that "what is first letter of german alphabet" is knowable on the web, only that its linguistic construction is not precisely replicated within it). The reflexive problem of using language to describe language, or in this case, a system of knowledge determined by language, is a contradiction that is embraced here ('pataphysics being a science of contradictions).