An Aesthetic of Critical Montage and Unstable Systems

Since the late 1980s, my work has developed through a sustained engagement with painting, photography, video, cinema, sound, installation and digital environments. This multiplicity stems neither from a scattered approach nor from eclecticism, but from an ongoing inquiry into the passages between media, their zones of interference and the ways they transform one another.

Early on, I chose to place these practices on equal footing, approaching them as different modes of expression within a shared field of inquiry. This position has led me towards a practice I might describe as the critical exploration of technological systems and contemporary forms of representation.

TECHNOLOGY, DISTANCE AND CRITIQUE

The technologies I work with—computational, audiovisual, generative or interactive—are never treated as neutral tools or celebrated for their own sake. My relationship with them always involves a degree of distance, analysis and, at times, critical tension.

As early as the late 1990s, with projects such as Chaosmos Radicelle and Babel Ritournelle, I was developing generative systems built around databases, combinatorial processes and interactive structures. Without my knowing it, these works anticipated principles that now lie at the heart of artificial intelligence: large-scale data processing, algorithmic recombination and the generation of variations from existing bodies of material.

Likewise, projects such as MAPPING (2000), along with my earliest subjective cartographies, predate Google Earth and the widespread adoption of GPS. They were already exploring an unstable, non-normative form of mapping, grounded in perception and experience rather than objective measurement.

These works are not predictions but critical intuitions. They inhabit a space in which technologies are sensed before they become woven into everyday life, often accompanied by an unease about the effects they might bring.

MONTAGE, GENERATIVE PROCESSES AND UNSTABLE FORMS

Montage lies at the heart of my approach.

I understand it less as a compositional technique than as a structural principle: bringing together unstable, fragmentary units that can be recombined to produce endlessly shifting forms.

In my video installations, generative films and interactive works, nothing is ever fixed. The works consist of loops, modules, units of time and perception that continually reconfigure themselves.

With KM/H, Chaosmos Radicelle and Brick Sessions, this logic takes on a radical form: the work becomes a living system, without beginning or end, unfolding from its centre through continuous variation.

LANGUAGE, VOICE AND THE UNRAVELLING OF MEANING

In my work, language is approached as both sonic and visual matter.

In Babel Ritournelle, it is reduced to its fundamental elements—phonemes—to become an autonomous field of composition. Meaning is suspended, giving way to a flow of vocal intensities.

More broadly, speech, textual fragments and title cards function as discontinuous elements, freed from any explanatory role. They serve not to anchor the images, but to open spaces of tension and indeterminacy.

MACHINE TIME AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE WORK

Much of my work explores the temporalities inherent in technological systems.

In generative works, time is no longer linear or narrative. Instead, it follows the internal rhythms of machines: clocks, cycles, repetitions and random variations.

In KM/H, this logic takes on a particular significance: the work is designed to evolve according to the computer’s clock, then disappear after a finite period. It thus introduces a form of programmed obsolescence that calls the very stability of the digital artwork into question.

SPACES, DRIFTS AND PREMONITIONS

Installations such as Chaosmos Radicelle, IN SITU and MAPPING explore forms of space beyond cartography, grounded in wandering, perception and subjectivity.

In their own way, these works anticipate profound changes in our relationship to space: the virtualisation of territories, the abstraction of places and the increasing fluidity of movement.

There is something in these works I might call premonitory—not in the sense of technological foresight, but as a sensitivity to the coming, sometimes unsettling shifts in systems of representation.

RETURNING TO MATTER: PAINTING AND RESISTANCE

As digital and generative systems accelerate, my work has recently taken another turn: a return to painting.

With the exhibition Retour aux fondamentaux (Back to Fundamentals), oil painting on paper becomes a deliberate counterpoint to algorithmic processes and generated imagery. It introduces slowness, material presence and a resistance to the flow and automated production of images.

This return marks a tension rather than a rupture. It continues an inquiry into forms of perception while opening a space of resistance to contemporary automatisms, particularly those associated with artificial intelligence.

POSITION

I situate my practice within a space where technology is never a neutral horizon, but a subject of critical exploration.

My approach might be described as a technological and conceptual nomadism, in which every tool is at once employed, repurposed and questioned.

AN OPENING

I love Deleuze. I love Godard.
But above all, I love those unstable zones where forms cease to be certainties and become processes.