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.

The html-movement-library is a web-based repository of short video clips and images by various performers who use html tags body an head

, as a starting point for generating movements. The idea of the library is to develop an expandable movemen