兆 - Écritures automatiques

From the veins of wood to constellations, from animal tracks left on the ground, the world offers itself to be read. But what of the traces produced by machines? Can they, too, constitute a form of writing? Here, these traces take the name 兆, an ideogram chosen by artist Rémi Lécussan to designate the automatic writings that run through the exhibition and transform into omens: marks carrying narratives, and futures yet to come. Do the wings of a drone, the spasms of a plush carp, or the stuttering of a malfunctioning machine also belong to the realm of the omen? What do they say? What do they address to us? At a time when linguistic-computational intelligence seems to impose itself as the dominant cognitive model, Rémi Lécussan creates fragile entities that unsettle our relationship to the living, to the machine, and to meaning itself—as if writing always meant trying to know what might be written at the very moment writing occurs, to borrow Marguerite Duras's words. The exhibition unfolds an ecology of low energy and ephemeral memory, as a critical counterpoint to contemporary computational inflation. Through low-cost bricolage, Lécussan hybridizes techno-informational apparatus with practices of domesticating living beings—feeders, aviaries, fish farms—to derail overly well-calibrated language machines. The exhibition space thus transforms into a deviant and fictional production system. The alphabets that greet us, supports for certain human languages, are destined to be digested by pigs whose existence is now piloted by AI in mechanized farms, while their intelligence is denied in favor of that of machines. Battery recycling bins become cervelas—sausages made from pig brain. Repulsive, these battery-cervelas remind us how the equation energy = intelligence (the more energy supplied, the more artificial intelligence produced) is fundamentally flawed. Another figure of AI, the voice assistant condemned to endless stuttering, remains useless; it will be of no help, gestures spin in a void, we go round in circles, and mechanized carp thrash randomly in spirulina. Unless they are replaying, again and again, the ascent of the Amur River. Starting from a global reflection on the asymmetry between the economic cost and environmental cost of computational-linguistic machines—articulating mining extractivism with the exploitation of living beings—Lécussan offers in return a vulnerable world, composed of circuits and organisms. In this universe, the failure of pragmatic communication reopens the possibility of human and other-than-human relations. The drone-bumblebee project, born in China, offers an exemplary system: in the wings of drones too heavy to fly or control, writing itself takes form—that of the living world, hesitant and becoming. Observing that we attribute intelligence to statistical machines while refusing it to the complex living organisms with whom we cohabit (pigs, carp, birds), Lécussan interrogates the supposed disembodiment of AI by revealing the living that it silently mobilizes. Faced with this paradox, the artist explores forms of consciousness that unfold outside of language. He thus invites us to rethink intelligence beyond the logos, which reduces it to human linguistic capacities alone. The exhibition 兆 / Automatic Writings envisions intelligence as a relational phenomenon, embodied, anchored in the body. If LLMs (Large Language Models) manipulate language in a disembodied way through statistical processes, what remains of the living and the corporeal in our relationship to this data and to the machines that produce it? In the exhibition, stuttering, laughter, and incongruity become refuges. Through them, flesh returns. Intelligence escapes the computation of language to become sensible once more. The mechanical tremors of the carp, too, await decipherment. Morgan Labar