Research

My researches focus on the operative forms of writing and the way in which they shape sensitive experience, through literary, visual and/or technical devices. My current fields of work can be summed up along the following three lines: writing as the creation of a materiality of time; the language hidden behind the image and the image hidden behind language; the questioning of the value of the useful.

Variations on the book: virtualities and modulations of writing and reading on screen

PhD in Esthetics, Paris-Nanterre University
2017-2024

How can we achieve the simultaneous book? This aim, expressed in these terms by the avantgardes of the early twentieth century, was a failure. The interplay between text and image, between legible and visible, has never succeeded in achieving effective simultaneity, which depends on the limits of our perceptive capacities.

But what does it mean to think of a book as simultaneous, beyond the immediacy of its sensitive perception? How can we envisage this desire to go beyond the limits of perception? The simultaneous book can only be read by God and from his omniscient point of view, anchored outside time and space. Instantaneous perception is therefore an attempt to reach a whole that is constantly fragmented by experience, representative of the human inability to confront the infinite. “Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre” (The world was made to end in a beautiful book): Mallarmé’s phrase represents this project, to restore the simultaneity of the relationship with the world in the objectified space that is the book.

The immediacy of reading and writing is an aporia. It leads us to reconsider the scope of the notion of simultaneity, by shifting it from the instant conceived as the perception of the coexistence of differentiated objects in the same time, proper to the divine point of view, to that of a variation coordinating different modalities of existence, in other words a coexistence of possible fragmentations. Simultaneity then becomes a vector for the splintering of a book that can no longer be considered either as a finite or defined object. To consider the book as variation is thus to consider it in the indeterminacy of its readings, in the indistinguishability of its spaces, and in a virtuality that becomes the essential modality enabling the coexistence of its variables.

Our hypothesis is that this book, whose simultaneity unfolds outside its existence as an object, is to be found in experiments in the digital arts, and more particularly in the development of certain programmes implementing hypermedia developments, which not only change the reading experience but also modify the general relationship to writing and its purpose by calling into question the particularities of a civilisational object. The stability of the book, an object with a beginning and an end, inscribes the discourse both in the positivity of all the writings in circulation, but also as a trace, contributing to the constitution of a historical discourse and the establishment of the archive.

The book thus becomes representative of the unquestioned adequacy of narrative to reality, of language to being, through its power of ordering, of objectification, through the externalisation of a thought that nevertheless becomes presence. But simultaneity redeployed in this way calls this presence into question: it hinges on the negativity of a language that is the only hold expression has on the real, the only way of expressing knowledge, while not being knowledge itself. As a result, what we will call the ‘digital book’ works, in our view, to undo the positivity of the book: the book that Stéphane Mallarmé, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze, among others, wanted to push to its limits, so as to be able to propose a form of writing that is no more than multiplicity, writing without a hold.

The question that remains, however, is that of the unity that any whole necessarily inculcates, and more particularly that induced by the digital, by the predetermination it proposes. The digital medium retains the duplicity present in all these attempts to go beyond the book through the book, bringing together continuity and discontinuity: a unity that draws back into itself any desire for dispersion, whether through the work, the title or the object. The technical device here is both an operator of totality and also an operator of indifferentiation: the programme has no ethics (except for the one we implement it), and it endlessly gathers together all the readings, only to consider them in the light of the pre-established relationships that are inculcated in it or that it creates of its own accord. So we can ask ourselves what the significance of writing in digital books is: is it just a mirror that shows us language as the only representation of ourselves, or does it carry a dimension that opens us up to the ‘other night’?

Publications & Contributions

Contributions

«Traverser l’écran: des archives en réflexion», École Supérieure des Arts de Lorraine, Metz, 19 may 2019.

«Archive et détermination technique: le bug comme dépense», contribution to the international colloquium "When the Interface Slips Away", Université Paris 8 / Archives Nationales, 26 november 2019.

«Des mobilités du livre : circulations, étapes et variations d’un livre informe», École Supérieure des Arts et Médias, Caen, 16 november 2020.

«Visible language ou des mobilités du texte», contribution to the 13th edition of the Printemps de la Typographie, INHA, 2022.

«"Pli selon pli": pour une approche baroque du lire et de l’écrire à l’écran», Haute École des Arts du Rhin, Strasbourg, 30 march 2022.

Publications

«Des transformations médiatiques des œuvres» in Vikhi Vahavek: biographie d'une artiste très professionnelle, édition Les Commissaires Anonymes, 2020.

«Stables et artificielles": les archives en ligne à travers le travail de Hanne Darboven», in Proteus, no 17, «Esthétique et politique de l’archive en art», Cyrielle Lévêque et Mélodie Marull (coord.), 2021, p. 106-117.

"Le design graphique au prisme de la transcréation", in Appareil no 24 [online], Design and Translation, Catherine Chomar-Ruiz (dir.), 2022.

Entries «Art concret» and «Grille», Glossary of Design for the website Design in translation (online).

«Replis du livre numérique» in Milon Alain (dir.), Autour du livre, Nanterre, Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2024, p. 167-193.

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