兆-雷米·勒库桑

From the veins of wood to constellations, from the footprints left by animals on the ground, the world offers itself to be read. But what about 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 are transformed into omens: marks that carry narratives and futures yet to come. Do the wings of a drone, the convulsions of a plush carp, or the stutterings of a malfunctioning machine also partake of the omen? What do they say? What do they address to us? At a time when linguistico-computational intelligence seems to be asserting itself as a dominant cognitive model, Lécussan creates fragile entities that trouble our relationship to the living, to machines, and to meaning itself—as if writing always amounted to attempting to know what might be written at the very moment writing occurs, to borrow the words of Marguerite Duras.

The exhibition unfolds an ecology of low energy and ephemeral memory, offering a critical counterpoint to contemporary computational inflation. Through low-cost bricolage, Lécussan hybridizes techno-informational apparatuses with practices of domesticating the living—feeders, aviaries, fish farms—in order to derail language machines that are all too well calibrated. The exhibition space thus becomes a deviant and fictional production system. The alphabets that greet us, supports of certain human languages, are destined to be digested by pigs whose existence is now steered by AI in mechanized farms, while their own intelligence is denied in favor of that of machines. Recycled battery collection bins become cervelas—sausages made of pig brains. Repellent, these battery-cervelas remind us how flawed the equation energy = intelligence is (the idea that supplying more energy would necessarily produce more artificial intelligence). Another figure of AI, the voice assistant, condemned to endless stuttering, remains useless; it will be of no help. Gestures spin in place, we tread water, and mechanized carps thrash about randomly in spirulina—unless they are endlessly reenacting the ascent of the Amur River.

Starting from a global reflection on the asymmetry between the economic cost and the environmental cost of computatio-linguistic machines—linking mineral extractivism to the exploitation of the living—Lécussan, in return, proposes a vulnerable world composed of circuits and organisms. In this universe, the failure of pragmatic communication reopens the possibility of human and more-than-human relations. The project of the drone-bees, developed in China, offers an exemplary system: in the wings of drones too heavy to fly or be controlled, writing itself takes shape—the writing of the living world, hesitant and in the making.

Observing that we attribute intelligence to statistical machines while denying it to complex living organisms with which we coexist (pigs, carps, birds), Lécussan questions the supposed disembodiment of AI by revealing the living beings it silently mobilizes. Faced with this paradox, the artist explores forms of consciousness that unfold outside language. He thus invites us to rethink intelligence beyond the logos, which reduces it to strictly human linguistic capacities. The exhibition 兆 / Écritures automatiques conceives intelligence as a relational, embodied phenomenon rooted in the body. If large language models manipulate language in a disembodied manner 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 slips away from the computation of language to become sensitive once more. The mechanical tremors of the carps, too, await deciphering.