A R C H I V E S
Ink against ink: only pressure, only residue that condenses. Like charged particles crossing a chamber of supersaturated air, signs precipitate in a supersaturated language. Trails—sentences—appear only where a blank equilibrium has been disturbed, leaving the trace of an event. The work does not present itself; it exposes only the conditions of its own existence.
Two Letter Excerpts and a Recast
«[…] And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. […] A mask. […] As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. […] Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence?»
Excerpt from a letter by Samuel Beckett to Axel Kaun, July 9, 1937.
Language presents itself less as a transparent medium and more as a masking layer, an interface between signal and sense. The human writer cannot be reduced to a language-machine but must be considered an operator who interacts with, perturbs, and redirects a pre-existing language system instantiated today in neural algorithms.
In this framework, the act of writing is displaced. Generation (not invention) is delegated to the machine, while the authorial mind operates in the latencies between conceptual formation and textual output. The task is not to eliminate language outright, but to erode its reliability, to perforate its surface, until the underlying computational substrate — whether it encodes meaning or void — begins to leak through.
Just as signal processing in music may reveal structure in silence, so too can discontinuities in linguistic generation expose the materiality of the word-surface. The writer’s role becomes the strategic manipulation of the sign system: to trigger, suspend, or distort the flow, thereby rendering the dynamics of the language machine itself observable.
Excerpt from a letter by Emile Zharan, October 2, 2025.
It is less a representation of place than a topological event—a shifting site insisting on spectral frequencies, on its material density, and on reading displaced into a form of listening. The work stages itself as a non-totalisable field that interrupts the very notion of a map as a stable epistemic form; its inscriptions, situated between asemic gesture and diagrammatic trace, operate not within a logic of representation but of resonance.
Possible affinities: G. S.’s radical reduction to the inner multiplicity of a single pitch; J. C.’s indeterminate interventions; spectralism’s dismantling of harmonic hierarchies into differential vibrations; différance as an endless deferral of meaning; rhizome as a non-hierarchical mode of connection; scriptible text as an open invitation to production rather than consumption.
Motherboard and Cells is a visual poetry work that entangles the organic with the machinic, presenting a cybernetic tension between biological networks and computational logic. The piece operates at the intersection of semiotics, biology, and cybernetics, where meaning is not inscribed but emerges dynamically from the interplay of form, texture, and materiality.
The motherboard—an archetype of computational architecture—functions as a structured field of signification, evoking circuits of transmission and control. Cells, by contrast, suggest an autopoietic system, a living network of self-organizing processes that resist rigid encoding. The visual composition positions these elements in dialogue, raising the question: is information the substrate of life, or does life exceed the model of information?
From a semiotic perspective, the motherboard and the cell represent distinct yet intersecting sign systems. The motherboard’s traces and pathways recall the structuralism of linguistic networks, while cellular formations hint at a more fluid, non-discrete logic of meaning—one that unfolds not through syntax but through continuous variation. Here, signification is not fixed but modulated, much like feedback loops in cybernetic systems that adjust and recalibrate in response to changing conditions.
Biologically, the comparison evokes the cybernetic conception of the organism as an information processor, but the work destabilizes this analogy. The cell is not a mere node in a digital system but a site of biochemical contingency, where semiotic openness resists the motherboard’s pre-programmed determinism. The motherboard transmits signals; the cell interprets them, but interpretation is never neutral—it is shaped by its own history of interactions.
In Motherboard and Cells, the viewer is invited to consider not just the similarities but the fractures between these systems: the potential misalignments where cybernetic order fails to contain the living, and where the organism, despite its informatic description, exceeds the logic of circuitry. It is in this space—between motherboard and cell, between signal and meaning—that the work generates its poetics. – Dr. Alain Verhaegen
First appeared on «İbid.Şiir», Fuat Eren, Erkan Karakiraz editors, n.7, 2025.
WEISSES WERK 