I was introduced today to the idea of ‘pataphysics, the idea of a science beyond metaphysics (maybe a pseudo-science) developed by Alfred Jarry in Paris in the 1890s in his play Ubu Roi as ‘the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments’.   The ideas apparently influenced Dada, surrealism and situationism and are maintained nowadays by the Collège de Pataphysique in Paris, founded in 1948 and whose members have included Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and, more recently, Umberto Eco.