Ivan Ilyich’s decline is a slow-breaking symmetry between life’s external forms and its internal truth. His existence, constructed from bureaucratic routines and polite appearances, resembles a finely tuned but hollow model—beautiful until disturbed. The illness is a perturbation that exposes the emptiness beneath, a flaw in the equations that cannot be renormalized away. As pain … Continue reading 73. The Death of Ivan Ilyich — Leo Tolstoy
From Artistic Language to Artistic Research
On 15 November I will present “Alchemy Beyond the Symbol: The Chimeric Glyphic System as a Language of Transformation” at a conference organised by the London Arts-Based Research Centre (LABRC) at St Anne's College, Oxford University. I will be participating online.The presentation grows out of The Chimeric Protocols of Transmutation / The Book of Split … Continue reading From Artistic Language to Artistic Research
72. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche’s prophet moves through the world like a charged scalar field attempting to rewrite the vacuum. Zarathustra rejects inherited values—morality, pity, metaphysics—declaring them decayed interactions unfit for a future humanity. He seeks a new symmetry, one grounded in affirmation rather than renunciation. The Übermensch becomes a hypothetical particle: not yet observed, yet necessary for the … Continue reading 72. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche
Can an Image Become a Language?
A circle is not automatically a word. A pathway is not automatically a sentence. But their relationships can be organised into a grammar.The Chimeric Glyphic System (CGS) is my attempt to investigate this possibility. It uses canonical glyphs, spatial position, orientation, repetition, enclosure, connection and movement to construct meaning through relationships rather than isolated signs.Traditional … Continue reading Can an Image Become a Language?
71. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Karamazov family is a four-body problem, their interactions chaotic, nonlinear, impossible to predict except in broad probabilistic strokes. Dmitri is kinetic energy incarnate, Ivan the cold calculus of rational charge, Alyosha the near-massless spiritual boson, and the father a gravitational distortion around which all paths bend. The patricide is a quantum event with classical … Continue reading 71. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Barcelona: The Unwritten Final Plate
At first, Barcelona seems to be waiting outside the book.The Chimeric Protocols begin as symbolic structures, and The Book of Split Ink follows their gradual awakening into consciousness. But as the work develops, the city enters the experiment.Barcelona's Roman foundations, markets, cloisters, courtyards, shelters, forgotten hospitals and streets form an environment of intersecting times and … Continue reading Barcelona: The Unwritten Final Plate
70. Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
Anna is a charged particle placed into an unstable potential well—society—whose boundaries are invisible yet rigid. Her love for Vronsky creates symmetry-breaking fields that ripple through aristocratic space, destabilizing every orbit around her. Tolstoy frames passion as a high-energy excitation: exhilarating at first, then catastrophically unsustainable once the system’s dissipation begins. Levin, by contrast, is … Continue reading 70. Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
What Makes a Book an Artwork?
As ArtsLibris brings artist books and independent publishing into focus in Barcelona, I have been thinking about a deceptively simple question: when does a book become an artwork in its own right?For The Chimeric Protocols of Transmutation / The Book of Split Ink, the answer lies partly in the relation between its pages. The publication … Continue reading What Makes a Book an Artwork?
69. Middlemarch — George Eliot
Eliot constructs a sociological Standard Model, mapping how individual desires propagate through the intertwined fields of marriage, politics, and vocation. Dorothea is a high-energy idealist, her moral charge so intense it distorts local spacetime, drawing others into her orbit and unsettling stale institutions. Lydgate is another promising excitation whose trajectory decays under the friction of … Continue reading 69. Middlemarch — George Eliot
Gala and Salvador: Two Ways of Seeing
One consciousness cannot see everything.In The Book of Split Ink, Gala and Salvador arise from the symbolic structures of the Chimeric Protocols themselves. Gala is associated with the lucid blue intelligence of structure, measure and architecture. Salvador carries a crimson world of ink, memory, root, wound and transformation in process.They are not two observers entering … Continue reading Gala and Salvador: Two Ways of Seeing
68. The Idiot — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Prince Myshkin is an anomaly—a positively charged moral particle introduced into a volatile environment dominated by suspicion, vanity, and wounded pride. His innocence operates like an unshielded field: instead of harmonizing others, it destabilizes them, revealing their bitterness, longing, and cruelty. Rogozhin is the counter-charge, drawn irresistibly to Myshkin but determined to pull him into … Continue reading 68. The Idiot — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Two Pages, One Experiment
Open the book at any of its paired compositions and you encounter two forms of writing.On the left, a plate from The Chimeric Protocols of Transmutation: a visual construction shaped by glyphs, pathways, boundaries and relations. On the right, a passage from The Book of Split Ink: the corresponding narrative world experienced through Gala and … Continue reading Two Pages, One Experiment
67. War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy constructs a macro-scale field theory where individuals behave like particles buffeted by historical forces far larger than themselves. Napoleon is a heavy boson whose presence distorts the entire energy landscape, yet Tolstoy insists his influence is statistical, not causal: no single agent determines the trajectory of nations. Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei move through these … Continue reading 67. War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy
A Book Written in Two Languages
What if a book could be read in two languages at once—one made of images, the other of words?The Chimeric Protocols of Transmutation / The Book of Split Ink is an experiment in the space between visual art and literature. One part of the book is composed of symbolic plates made with the Chimeric Glyphic … Continue reading A Book Written in Two Languages
66. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Raskolnikov is a split particle—two incompatible wavefunctions occupying the same moral space, oscillating between cold rationality and unbearable empathy. His crime is a violent symmetry breaking meant to prove he exists outside human norms; instead it exposes him to the weak force of conscience, a subtle interaction that decays even the strongest self-justification. Sonia acts … Continue reading 66. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
A.I. in an artistical practice: to be or not to be?
This topic is a very much debated and polarizing issue. Not only inside the artistic comunity but in society as a whole. The artistic comunity is just part of the wider debate about what kind of tasks can be delegated to a machine and which ones should remain the sole prerogatives of human operators. For … Continue reading A.I. in an artistical practice: to be or not to be?
65. Les Misérables — Victor Hugo
Hugo constructs a sprawling universe governed by moral gravitation: characters fall, collide, and rise according to forces that surpass purely human control. Jean Valjean is a massive particle with a past that generates persistent curvature in the social field. Javert, rigid as a steel boson, represents law as an inflexible interaction—one incapable of accommodating the … Continue reading 65. Les Misérables — Victor Hugo
Revolutionizing Art: From Dependency to Agility
To break out of its insular trap, art must make a sharp, concrete shift from conceptual decoration to material utility. It must stop acting as a mirror that merely reflects the echo chamber's anxieties and start acting as a hammer that shapes physical reality.Concretely, if the world is moving into a fractured, resource-scarce, multi-polar era, … Continue reading Revolutionizing Art: From Dependency to Agility
64. Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
Emma Bovary is a resonance that cannot stabilize—a particle constructed from longing, fantasy, and cultural pressure, oscillating rapidly until it decays. She seeks a higher-energy state than provincial life can provide, but every attempt to excite her world collapses back into the same dull vacuum. Charles is a low-mass, low-interaction body, immune to her fluctuations; … Continue reading 64. Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
The End of Safe Rebellion in Alternative Art
To the artist and the alternative scene currently locked inside their own paradigm—safely insulated within subcultural rhetorics, institutional grants, and predictable, echo-chamber critiques—the reality of this shifting world offers a harsh, sobering wake-up call: You are acting like the pampered artists of late-stage Rome, painting beautiful frescoes on the villa walls while the gate hinges … Continue reading The End of Safe Rebellion in Alternative Art