device

The Mandel.brot Project (http://www.mandelbrot.fr, in French) has existed online since 1999. From the beginning, we dedicated our project to an experimentation with the aesthetics of the ephemeral and the flow; we thus refuse any archiving of the source files of our creations. The creations remain on the web for a few months. Then they are removed forever. And even when they are online, they permanently face extinction: the instability of the digital device is integrated as a fundamental aesthetic principle in all our works (see « Flux »: the movement of the words was supposed to be calm and relaxing; but on powerful computers, the flow is transformed into a wild torrent). Each creation on Mandel.brot thematizes this instability in a specific way.The Mandel.brot Project is a dialogue (we invite you to compare for example « Soleil Amer » and « Inexorable »), which sometimes becomes animated, and sometimes stops for a long time. None of the creations on Mandel.brot can be separated from their context: the website and the device, which remains deliberately unstable.

(Source: Authors' description for ELO_AI)

Small uncomfortable reading poems is a set of 4 poems based on 2 ideas; each poem is “a tool” and the poem creates an incompatibility between ergodic and noematic reading: the reader must act in order to read “now” at present time, but her action impeded reading what happens just after.

The 4 poems are:brush to dust/blow the fictionIt consists in a generative fiction the reader cannot read because the text is recovered by a picture of dust. She must move her mouse to dust the text, but doing this, she an only read few words of the fiction at each time because dust reappears. She must also circulate into the text via scroll bar without seeing the text. plane poemIt consists in a kinetic poem recovered by a flat tint. The reader must plane the tint with her mouse in order to read. Problem: the flat tint re-forms even and she must plane more and more, continuously, but she can only read fragments of the poem. a poem to stirStarting by a set of about 20 strophes, the program generates 30 renga choosing in a set of  pproximately 9000 potential generated renga using combinatory generation, syntactic adaptation and semantic  iltering. These poems are edited by the program to form a kinetic animation. The program calculates everything but don’t show it to the reader. In order to see it, the reader must create space by doing circles with the mouse, energy by doing horizontal lines and order by doing vertical lines. If she doesn’t do this, she sees a chaotic visual made by pixels of the poem. Problem: she cannot do the 3 movements at the same time and while she doesn’t do a movement, the controlled  arameter decreases, increasing the chaotic pictorial dimension to the detriment of the readable poetic dimension. What to do?

jogging poemThe poem is generated. It is shown part by part but is destroyed and disturbed by graphical process. In order to read, the reader must press a key that is changing at each time and just after she must click on an object that changes of location at each time. Problem, the speed of the process crows at each action and she must “run by hand” to read.