The entire universe has flattened
Onto my skin
An infinite layer
In zero gravity
I inhale the ocean of data
I swallow an amalgam of virtual beings
Trillions of similar and divergent bodies
Confusing themselves
In a single cloud of pixels
A fog of noise
Instantly densified into a calculation network
To forge
My structure
A lace of triangulated meshes
The window opens, full screen, with its central scene, the inventory, the settings in a column. I double-click on the 'characters' folder and then on a gray square where G9's humanoid head is depicted.
An asexual body appears. Standing, straight. Arms raised, shoulder-high, in a perfectly horizontal line. It's an immaculate canvas, generic in appearance, hairless. I observe it like a blank page on which I will formulate a first sentence. I circulate around it, with a movement of the mouse.
Centered in its appearance room, without any wall, without ceiling, with a grid for a floor, my initial creature defies me with its fixed gaze.
I enter a hypnotic phase.
I let myself be carried away by a series of pictorial maneuvers. At the same time, the text to be written swells in my mental space.
I dive into the head of my narrator and there I discover another woman. This character, in the abyss of the first, programs humanoid automatons isolated each in their cocoon. The idea moves at the tip of my fingers; I export G9 to Blender, I add a planar mesh to the 3D scene that I immediately subdivide into thousands of faces. I impose a soft body script on it; I place it one meter above the virtual body and I start the calculation.
I then find myself in my balance zone, between a literary paragraph and a pictorial composition. I don't know if the text is the germ of a digital work or if it's the other way around. The two windows are juxtaposed. That of Blender with its operation of softening a virtual square into a fluid animated surface; and that of Word, where the words organize the flow of consciousness of a character who whispers to me:
I am a line of code with a binary mind
captive of my own algorithmic cocoon
And it is at this precise moment that I open a new page to write the text where your gaze is currently sliding. I have been pushing back for weeks this moment when I will become aware that I have just committed myself to the realization phase of POIESIS.
I am there.
When it comes time to concretize a work, I need an anchor. A starting point. In a novelistic construction, it's the first page. Everything is there. The tone. The atmosphere. The momentum. I will return, for years, to this initial fragment. It is from its vibration that I will manage to write all the text.
However, until today, the anchor of POIESIS was elusive. After having accumulated, in a tangle of virtual folders, dozens of modeling renders, 3D object files, text fragments and serial video exports, it is by rereading this sentence captive of my own algorithmic cocoon that I understand not only where I am but also what has taken shape during my research.
There was the decisive moment when I realized that the title of the project, as well as that of each of the chapters, should all stem from etymological research. In order to find the origin. The starting point. The source. The creation cocoon.
This virtual body, stuck in a fundamental resin from which it will emerge, imposes itself as a metaphor for the project in gestation. This deployment scene prompts me to transition from the exploratory phase to that of manifestation.
The character asks to be born.
And it stimulates me to enter into poiesis.
3D modeling & animation | digital images | videos | text : KAROLINE GEORGES
music : ALEX FOREST
