‘Poetry Is Language Hacking’

How would you define poetry?

Poetry is language hacking.

How important is poetry in your work as a whole? Your artistic creations seem to oscillate between poetry and the visual arts. Could you explain how poetry connects all aspects of your work? Should we talk of poetics or poetry in relation to your work?

I create both visual artworks that are best understood in the context of contemporary art and poems that are best understood in the context of experimental literature. Sometimes, there is a crossover between the two – and, of course, nothing prevents one type of work from being exhibited in a different context. In all cases, independently of what I make, how I publish, or where I show, poetry is central in my life and my practice. ‘Poetics’ is a term that designates a principle, an overall vision, a tenet, or core issues or approaches in my work. ‘Poems’ are aesthetic objects of literary value that I have created.

In your poetic theories, you mention a ‘semiological continuum’1 to designate a fluid syntax, a poetics that includes several lines to follow. Your pioneering work challenges old categories and invents new languages and objects. How does this idea of a continuum comply with the potential loss of meaning during the (asemic) transition from one mode of thought or representation to another?

The notion that the transition is asemic is a result of applying to my work not its own logic but rather the traditional model in which signs have stable configurations themselves and maintain stable relationships with referents. In my work, the transitions have to be taken together, as the spectrum that they constitute, including their instability and reversibility. The transitions are not meant to configure a specific meaning; instead, they evoke precisely intermediary meanings that can’t be pinned down. That is precisely what makes them new and so interesting.

You elaborate unpredictable connections between systems (of thought, reading or writing codes), objects, materials and species (plant and human DNA in Edunia, rocket and paper sculpture in the Inner Telescope, bacteria and the Bible in Genesis). Could the beauty of poetry lie as much in the way connections are made as in the work of art as a finished object?

I believe that where poets primarily express their vision of aesthetics and of the world is in their syntax, so, yes, how discrete units combine to form larger units and, ultimately, produce a sensorial and/or intellectual experience is extremely relevant in my work.

Another aspect of your poetry seems to highlight the impossibility of fixing the real (which is always enigmatic). The Minitel poems (1985–86), the holopoems (Chaos, 1986) or digital poems (Letter, 1996), the aromatic poems (Osmobox, 2014) or the spatial poems (Adsum, 2019) play on the phenomena of evanescence, appearance and disappearance. Could we talk about ‘transpoetry’ or ‘fluid poetry’ (I don’t know if any of these words would correspond to your work)?

In the context of holopoetry, I had already theorized the notion of ‘fluid sign’ to designate a sign that doesn’t exhibit a single, stable configuration, as we see in printed words or sculptural objects. So, yes, a poem made of ‘fluid signs’ could, in this sense, be said to be a ‘fluid poem’.

Your poems are disturbing, whether they are digital poems that are resistant to interpretation or bio-poems that are constantly changing. They side with the unexpected, with possible variations and potential evolution having nothing to do with fixed portraits. Hence their uniqueness. Hence the unforeseen developments. How do you welcome the unknown in your creative process?

In chaos theory, there’s a fortuitous expression that is applicable here: ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’. This basically means that, given an original state, small changes can have large consequences. In the case of poems and artworks, the consequences are on the order of meaning and aesthetic experience. Change in particular conditions (room temperature, for example) and decisions made by viewers, readers or participants (never click on a letter or space in a digital poem or choose to bend their knees in front of a holopoem, for example) can have greater implications in what happens. I welcome these variables and transformations as an intrinsic part of my work.

In your poetry as well as in your theory, you show a fascination with the microscopic, microorganisms and the indistinguishable: the sounds inaudible to the human ear produced by dolphins or elephants, atoms and molecules. The use of bacteria and amoebae can spark new languages. To what extent does your work relate to the quantum world or nanotechnology?

I wouldn’t say that I have a ‘fascination’ because, in English, at least, it can sound uncritical, as if one was spellbound or transfixed, which is not the case. I’d say that I have an artistic and intellectual interest. So, yes, I’m interested in the infinitely small, but I’m particularly interested in the relationship between what we humans perceive as very small and very large. Certainly, these notions are relative to our own scale and perception. I’m also interested in the fact that notions so central to our understanding of ourselves and our position in the world and universe are relative. I bring this relativity to my practice in multiple ways, rendering explicit the ultimate relative condition of language, form and meaning. In quantum mechanics, we find the ‘uncertainty principle’ which, although it has a very specific and restrictive meaning in science, if given poetic license, can be transposed to other fields. In fact, I’ve written extensively about this in the context of holopoetry, because in my holopoems a viewer, moving or stationary, can never seize all properties of the work entirely. When looking, one has to make choices and understand that perception will always be partial. This is one of the most radical and innovative characteristics of my holopoems.

I attended with you virtually live from YouTube the launch of the American rocket, carrying your most recent space poem, Adsum (2019), to the Columbus space station on 19 February 2022. It will indeed be sent to the Moon in March 2025. The poem is a cubic glass sculpture on which the viewer can act with the tip of his finger. We can see symbols with our finger. Does the poem encourage to embrace multiple ways of thinking and seeing? When we act frantically on Adsum, with our finger sliding across the screen, the cube becomes more complex, the symbols go crazy. Are you thinking about the aesthetic or tactile emotion that the object can provoke? What is the emotional part of your work?

This is a very interesting question, in the sense that I cannot and do not want to control or orient the emotional experience of the viewer. So, it’s impossible for me to know how viewers and participants will react emotionally. Having said that, I should point out that Adsum is an artwork/poem conceived for the Moon – which I hope to accomplish years from now. In this sense, the flight to the ISS was a first and important step to confirm that Adsum was ready to reach greater heights. From the point of view of emotional response, I imagine that, when Moon archaeologists discover Adsum in the future, they might be touched the same way that we are excited when we discover a beautiful and impeccable Roman mosaic or fresco, which continues to speak to us across the sea of time.

Contrary to your holopoems in which one letter (W in Phoenix, 1989, for example) or one word can take different shapes or meanings, Lagoglyphs: The Bunny Variations (2007) works with an infinite number of signs that are constantly renewed but seem to have a fixed meaning. We indeed encounter formal variations of Alba (2000). Am I getting in the right direction? Can you elaborate on this lagoglyph language? Thank you so much!

Lagoglyphs are a series of works in which I develop a ‘leporimorph’ or ‘rabbitographic’ form of writing. In development since 2006, this series includes prints, murals, sculptures, paintings, an algorithmic animation and satellite works created specifically for visualization in Google Maps and Google Earth. As visual language that alludes to meaning but resists interpretation, the Lagoglyphs series stands as the counterpoint to the barrage of discourses generated through, with, and around my GFP Bunny (my green-glowing transgenic bunny, called Alba, created in 2000 and featured in exhibitions and publications worldwide).
The pictograms that make up the Lagoglyphs are visual symbols representing Alba rather than the sounds or phonemes of words. Devoid of characters and phonetic symbols, devoid of syllabic and logographic meaning, the Lagoglyphs function through a repertoire of gestures, textures, forms, juxtapositions, superpositions, opacities, transparencies, and ligatures. These coalesce into an idioglossic and polyvalent script structured through visual compositional units that multiply rather than circumscribe meanings.
Composed of double-mark calligraphic units (one in green, the other in black), the Lagoglyphs evoke the birth of writing (as in cuneiform script, hieroglyphic orthography, or ideography). However, they deliberately oscillate between monoreferentiality (always Alba) and the patterns of a visual idiolect (my own). In so doing, the Lagoglyphs ultimately form a kind of pictorial idioglossia or cryptolanguage. In the Lagoglyphs, I create a series that brings from poetry both the power of condensation of meaning and the productive ambiguity of carefully crafted linguistic syntagms.
While genetic engineering has often been compared to a language, ‘the script of life’, I have always disagreed with this analogy and rejected it as a hollow metaphor, extremely reductive and insufficient to account for the true relational and interdependent complexity of life.
In the Lagoglyphs, I bring together the multiple forms and the varied issues that have continuously informed my art. Indeed, a new chirographic synthesis that is also a new beginning, one in which word and image come together as mark and meaning.