Gerridae

Graphic fragments evolve on a screen. Their behavior and interaction model is inspired by that of water spiders (Gerris, from the Gerridae family) on the surface of a pond. When the viewer approaches and brushes the frame of the screen, the fragments stabilize and assemble into a poetic, cryptic, random but nevertheless (if desired) divinatory proposition.

Man has always sought to see in autonomous natural manifestations (the shapes of clouds, the flight of birds...) "signs" that would enlighten him about his future. Unable to understand the reasons why an object or organism comes to life, he stubbornly seeks an intentionality, a will outside himself that would express itself through this movement, and then calls on an initiated mediator, the oracle, to transform these encrypted signs into intelligible messages addressed exclusively to himself. This anthropocentric reflex is not exclusive to primitive tribes. Even for us, the idea of chance and the absence of divine determinism in the origin of these movements, as expressed by the Epicureans with regard to atoms, is never self-evident (which is why I wrote "De notre nature") and is constantly being rediscovered. A good example of this is the elliptical, mysterious phrase that everyone has heard before, usually thrown in to close a discussion: "In any case, there is no chance...". This phrase underlies a related proposition which is that, if you put your mind to it, "Everything can be explained." In these moments, we're usually talking, not about the movement of natural things, but about the movement of things we don't generally understand. And if the intention behind these movements is not that of a god in due form, there is here the affirmation of a universal deterministic principle that governs the world. There is no chance and no insignificance. Everything is a sign, everything makes sense. All that remains is to find the right oracle. Gerridae started from the idea that if everything makes sense, then I'd enjoy producing the signs, or at least the context in which they can emerge. (It is, it seems to me, the artist's job to produce signs). In Gerridae, then, I create the insect pond that is to act as a sign, and leave it up to the viewer to decide when the insects are to express themselves. When he touches the frame with his hand, the electronic "insects" turn into a sentence. I've used the structure of the I Ching, along with suggestions from the text generator developed by Jean-Pierre Balpe and Samuel Szoniecky, to produce random poetic propositions which, if the user wants to see it that way, can come close to cryptic divination. I hope, however, that the user will see it above all as poetry that, just as much as prediction, reveals unsuspected aspects of what it's talking about.