Pataphysics is perhaps best (mis)understood by looking at some of its recurring themes, such as exceptions, syzygies, anomalies, clinamen, antinomies, contradictions, equivalents and imaginaries.
Clinamen

The term clinamen was first coined by Lucretius when he needed to name the aleatory swerve of atoms in their descent described by Epicurus. Approximately two millennia later, Alfred Jarry resurrected this obscured concept as a key principle of pataphysics. Its influences can be found in the Situationists’ détournement, the Dadaists’ ready-mades and Oulipo’s verbal games, and so on. Lucretius had already linked the indeterministic property of the clinamen to free will and the Oulipo interprets it as a chance to escape certain restrictions given that any initial constraint are still followed (just as the atoms don’t randomly start to ascend but they swerve). Experimental poet Christian Bök has called the clinamen the smallest possible aberration that can make the greatest possible difference.

One good example of a clinamen in action is Jarry’s merdre (the very first word in his Ubu play). He squeezed an extra ‘r’ into the French word ‘merde’ (meaning shit) and translates into something like ‘pshit’. By rendering a useful (if rude) word useless in this way, he introduced a pataphysical sense of creativity that persists: the word still exerts a fascination today.
Syzygy

A syzygy both surprises and confuses. The concept originally comes from the field of astronomy where it denotes the alignment of three celestial bodies. In a pataphysical context it usually describes a conjunction of things, something unexpected and surprising. Unlike serendipity, a simple chance encounter, the syzygy has a more scientific purpose. A typical instance is the pun, which Jarry called the syzygy of words. Next to being intentionally funny, puns demonstrate a clever use (or abuse) of grammar, syntax, pronunciation and/or semantics, often taken to a quite scientific level, such that without understanding of what is said and what the intended meaning is, the humour of the pun might be lost.
Antinomy

The antinomy, in a pataphysical sense, is the mutually incompatible or paradox. Mutually contradictory opposites can and do co-exist in the pataphysical universe.
Alfred Jarry

Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) is without doubt the prime exponent of pataphysics. The word pataphysics was invented by him and some of his schoolmates in France in the 1880s and Jarry elaborated on that initial idea, both in his celebrated Ubu plays and in his novels and speculative writings. He has been described as a poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, artist, eccentric, alcoholic and sometimes even a lunatic.
Technical details

In short, the tool reads in a library of plaintext files, and creates an index (a dictionary type data structure storing the vocabulary of the whole corpus together with a list that contains all documents and positions of the term within the document in the vocabulary). There are two collections of texts to choose from, either the Faustroll corpus or the Shakespeare corpus at this point.
Index:
{word1: [[fileA, posa], [fileB, posb], ...], word2: [[fileC, posc], [fileK, posk], ...], ... }

All texts in the corpus are read into memory and processed, for example any stopwords of the source language are removed.

Once a user submits a query, various important functions are triggered. First, the three patalgorithms are run to populate a list of results to be rendered.
Results:
[(title, (pre, word, post), algorithm), ...]

Each algorithm pataphysicalises the original query term in its own way and looks for matches in the index.

Results are presented in one of three ways. The default is the poetry view. It displays 14 lines of text, each of which can be changed to another iff more results are available. This is heavily inspried by Raymond Queneau's 'Cent mille milliards de poèmes'. The other two options show the results either sorted by their source or by the algorithm by which they were generated.

A light Rust API for Multiresolution Stochastic Texture Synthesis [1], a non-parametric example-based algorithm for image generation.

https://github.com/anopara

Naming is hard. Names, after all, are perhaps the most indelible artifacts of the product creation process. Brands are redesigned with a lustrum regularity and codebases are continually rewritten and replaced but a name, for better or worse, usually sticks.

That’s because a good name is a hook that sets itself into a person’s mind, linking their brain back to your idea – try to reset the hook and you risk losing the connection. The process of naming, then, is the process of neatly packaging up that idea, discovering where it begins and ends so it can be linked as a discrete, easily remembered concept.

A good name can help a company or product become successful, of course, but it can also help the lowliest code library find an audience, help formalize an informal process, and propel ideas about the world toward becoming talking points throughout it.

And yet, what tools do we use for naming? What methodology? Many of us practice it informally, doing our best with thesauruses and domain name searches, never stopping to formalize an approach because it seems so devilishly simple – all you really need is a word or two in a language you’ve probably been using your entire life.

But like any art form, naming benefits from rich tools and processes, and this site is meant to help you discover them – to provide a starting point for anyone who needs to name something. That is: everyone, because every idea benefits from a good name.

Repaint your picture in the style of your favorite artist.

About

Our mission is to provide a novel artistic painting tool that allows everyone to create and share artistic pictures with just a few clicks. All you need to do is upload a photo and choose your favorite style. Our servers will then render your artwork for you. We apply an algorithm developed by Leon Gatys, Alexander Ecker and Matthias Bethge. The website was originally created by Łukasz Kidziński and Michał Warchoł. We have now joined forces to provide you with the latest technology in even more accessible way.

Our Team

Five researchers from the Bethge lab at University of Tübingen (Germany), CHILI Lab at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) and Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium).

The Aziz! Light Crew Freeliner is a live geometric animation software built with Processing. The documentation is a little sparse and the ux is rough but powerfull.

Also known as a!LcFreeliner. This software is feature-full geometric animation software built for live projection mapping. Development started in fall 2013.

It is made with Processing. It is licensed as GNU Lesser General Public License. A official release will occur once I have solidified the new architecture developed during this semester.

Using a computer mouse cursor the user can create geometric forms composed of line segments. These can be created in groups, also known as segmentGroup. To facilitate this task the software has features such as centering, snapping, nudging, fixed length segments, fixed angles, grids, and mouse sensitivity adjustment.

Fractorium and its associated command line tools can render fractal flames using the CPU, or OpenCL. In order to use OpenCL, you must have an nVidia card that has the Fermi architecture or later, or a recent AMD card. If you attempt to use an unsupported card, you will receive an error message and the CPU renderer will be used instead.

PatterNodes is a procedural design to for creating graphical patterns, animations or illustrations based on repetitions. This is done by defining a sequence of steps that describes the design, using nodes and connections between them. PatterNodes is designed from the start to make it easy to tweak things to see how they turn out. Therefore the resulting design output is always shown in the bottom preview view, repeated for patterns and updating in real time with any changes, giving you instant feedback of what the end result will be.

While the software can be used to create many types of illustrations and animations it's primarily aimed at pattern creation. To make pattern creation easier PatterNodes also includes a lot of nodes that automatically perform common tedious tasks like repeating elements at the tile edges to make the pattern seamless, or randomizing different aspects (like color, position, rotation..) of the elements in a pattern to give it a little more life.

https://creativepro.com/review-patternodes/
https://www.behance.net/lostminds

Crytch is a web tool for creating and encrypting visual messages.

It transfers the idea of Visual Cryptography to letters and shapes consisting of multiple anchor points and connecting lines. As soon as one begins to enter a password, these points start moving on a variable matrix. That way, the password will never be stored on the server.

The correctly decrypted image is the only possible verification of a valid password. Thus, the exact point at which the original image is revealed can solely be determined by a human observer.

All text messages are displayed in a typeface speci­fi­cally designed for Crytch. In order to make it impossible to deduce the encrypted letter just by counting its anchor points, all glyphs consist of the exact same amount.