Contemporânea

AnaMary Bilbao: With artificial intelligence, what is at stake is not merely the stupefaction of the image, but the anticipatory conditioning of what may be known, rendered visible, or imagined. The bodies in The Unnamable twist and transform, yet repeatedly return to a recognisable form within a closed system. So there is movement, but not the potential for an unforeseeable future—the potential that exists parasitically within systems of power, and against which Jacques Derrida so often cautioned us; there is mutation, but no opening onto genuine indeterminacy. It is a dormant movement repeating through algorithmic impulses, a zombie body that executes, reacts, and persists, while the possibility of rebellion, replaced by a choreography of predictability, is neutralised before it can even be formulated. AI operates precisely within this regime: it encloses the future within an anticipatory logic, eliminating that which has historically nourished action—the unsayable, the hidden, the uncertain.

The rhetoric of the democratisation of knowledge is central to this blockage. By promising total, immediate, universal access, it repositions us as passive subjects, while action is supplanted by automated response. The figures continue to move, react, and adapt, even after any capacity for decision or disobedience has been stripped away. In this sense, AI does not reinforce any democratic project; rather, it exposes its failure. It persuades rather than imposes, normalises rather than forbids, approximating a veiled form of despotism. The zombie is its quintessential political figure: fully functional, perfectly adapted, deprived of agency. And yet, if any possibility of rebellion remains, it lies not in these bodies but in the system’s errors—its deviations, its glitches, what the machine cannot control or predict. These residues are the only possible sites of friction. Hence the pertinence of Beckett: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Error impedes the predetermination of visibilities and urges a primordial plunge into the Sensible.

AMB: The proposition underpinning The Unnamable is inscribed within a critical lineage of musical manifestations that have challenged authority and normativity at specific historical moments, expressing the subversive capacity of sound’s synchronic power—or even of the score’s control. One might think of Persimfans, of the soloist’s autonomy within the improvisatory freedom inherent in Classical cadenzas, of the total improvisation in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37 (1800), of John Cage or Pierre Schaeffer, to name but a few. In many of these instances, the conductor, or even the musician, refuses to occupy a position of power, becoming instead a facilitator of the unforeseen, and consequently a promoter of a collectivity that suspends hierarchy, as Luciano Berio did masterfully in Sinfonia (1968–9), whose third movement, In ruhig fliessender Bewegung [In Calm Flowing Motion], is reactivated in The Unnamable.

Considering all this, what this work seeks to challenge is the dynamic internal to a dominant language (AI) and the frictions it cannot control, exposing them. Let me take up a word you use in your question: strategy. Strategy presupposes defence, calculation, anticipation: precisely the regime the work attempts to lay bare and contest. Algorithmic logic asserts itself as strategy. By contrast, artistic practice and the work itself remain in an unprotected space where control is not guaranteed.

If The Unnamable exposes the premeditated choreography of AI, it does so equally to allow the work to be traversed by the unpredictability of chance and by failures unanticipated, and therefore unavoided, by the governing strategy. Discontinuity and rupture thus emerge as consequences rather than methods, as has often occurred in my practice, from early works such as Presente Passado (2013–7) to more recent pieces like Prelude (2024). In the particular case of The Unnamable, the estrangement produced by sounds at once recognisable and alien is not exhausted in disturbance or depletion. Rather, the work seeks to reinstate a space of wonder that becomes productive once more—a wonder that does not lead to immediate meaning, but suspends certainties and reopens the question of Being. It is a site of non-meaning and abyss that does not collapse into negativity; and it is precisely within this unstable interval that a new horizon of signification may emerge, and the promise of displacement remain alive. Sound is decisive in this process because it brings to the fore not only aesthetic questions but also epistemological ones. Whereas Beckett turned the use of language into its own potential sound, and Luciano Berio drew on music and the spoken word to harness a state of fundamental saturation, The Unnamable works through sonic failure: the possibility of action emerges from the unintended error of word and sound. AI software operates as a translation device: it separates, converts, interprets; and in doing so, it omits, distorts, and reconfigures meaning. Its inability to translate certain languages, timbres, or non-normative structures—often non-Anglo-Saxon—returns noises, groans, or sonic residues that lay bare the violence implicit in any regime of totalising translation. As such, The Unnamable exposes translation as an inevitable site of loss and deviation, just as from chaotic, meaningless sound or melody may arise the force that "gives birth to a dancing star," to borrow Nietzsche’s words (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883).

AMB: As I read your question, I am reminded of Albert Camus’s notion of freedom. For him, it is thinkable only because suicide is possible. Camus reflects on the possibility of an ending as bound up with the importance of choice as the essential act of freedom—the awareness of the possibility of suicide (of an end) is inseparable from human lucidity. Taking this further, I think that the real defeat here does not lie in death, but in the system’s inability to accept it. These figures, oscillating between marionette, animated zombie, and algorithm, inhabit a regime in which the end is neutralised; as such, they belong to an algorithmic space where freedom does not exist, just as human lucidity is absent. In the absence of biological, historical, or temporal limits, death can no longer function as a condition of openness to Being. What asserts itself instead is the imperative of continuity: everything must remain operative, productive, knowable, available. In that sense, these images do not merely represent abandoned subjects, but bodies captured by a regime that structurally refuses the end.

When, in 1949, Theodor W. Adorno spoke of the impossibility of lyric poetry after barbarism, or when Jean-Luc Godard declared, in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988), the death of cinema in the face of its industrialisation and mythification, they were not announcing an absolute end, but exposing a historical crisis. In such gestures, the end functions as a denunciation and as an opening. It has never been collapse itself that brought art to a halt, but the refusal to acknowledge it. We may therefore speak of a failure of representation, of technology, and even of art itself; yet this failure should not be read as exhaustion, but rather, in Camusian terms, as potential freedom. What is at stake is not the death of art, but its capture by a regime that now demands continuous signification, total knowledge, and uninterrupted production. Reintroducing the possibility of ending, failure, and wonder thus becomes a fundamental gesture in the world. And The Unnamable aspires to be no less than that: an act of resistance against the illusion of total control and against the current algorithmic management of life and death, within an existence in which there is no longer room for what escapes. It is here that wonder acquires decisive force. Far from being merely a technical glitch or aesthetic flaw, the strangeness that leads to wonder becomes a motor that interrupts the automatism of meaning, countering a contemporary form of power that seeks to suppress indeterminacy through technique, total prediction, and automatic response. The abyss, wonder, strangeness—all are liminal experiences of confrontation with not-knowing that suspend instrumental knowledge and return thought to its primordial openness. Ultimately, there is an acknowledgment here, to put it in Bataillean terms, that unknowing reveals what knowledge encloses. I would like to believe that it is precisely where AI fails to anticipate—in that space of wonder before the unknown, where sounds and noises begin to intimate an ending—that the work restores human lucidity.

AMB: Yes, I would—and it emerges precisely from what cannot be controlled. Technology cannot lay waste to what it cannot foresee; and in that sense, each error acts not as a form of destruction, but as something that counters the destructive impulse contained in any gesture of anticipation. Within this framework, language ceases to be a transparent instrument serving interiority and instead becomes a field of forces that precedes and exceeds whoever speaks. The “I” does not speak; it is spoken. What presents itself as an individual voice reveals an unstable montage of phrases, echoes of other discourses. Enunciative identity thus becomes structurally precarious, founded on repetition, without a clearly locatable origin. In Beckett, too, speech appears as something that happens despite the subject, rather than through its will. The “I” is continually unsettled by the very language that sustains it: who is speaking? The Beckettian subject is less an agent of discourse than its provisional site. If the I is constituted by prior voices, then the singularity of the subject does not lie in originality, but in how it is traversed by forces beyond its control. Language thus becomes an impersonal, almost machinic device, using the subject as temporary support. To speak becomes an act of exposure to alterity rather than an assertion of identity.

This displacement is not neutral. By undoing the illusion of a fully autonomous voice, language exposes the power mechanisms that structure it—norms, regimes of enunciation, expectations of meaning. The speaking “I” is always shaped by such conditions. Beckett’s insistence on the exhaustion of speech and the failure of the subject can be read as a refusal of language as an instrument of authority, clarity, or mastery. Discourse leads not to affirmation but to collapse; not to identity but to its dissolution. Interestingly, in The Unnamable, it was the reading of Beckett’s excerpts that survived AI conversion most successfully. And for that reason, the work allows the I to be reconsidered through its potential problematisation. The subject persists, though as a fragile, decentred instance, always belated in relation to what it says. The “I” does not coincide with itself because it never speaks first—it always comes after the words have already arrived. So, it is precisely through this Beckettian delay, and through this total depersonalisation produced by technology, yet paradoxically indestructible by it, that The Unnamable opens up space for new meanings and shifts beyond itself.

AMB: Yes, I believe it is. The dream of the cinema auditorium, for instance, was profoundly fraternal. In that space, too, the mouth so often came to rest in silence, initiating a radical experience. A similar silence marked the interview Samuel Beckett gave to Swedish television when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1969. I confess that for a time I considered allowing that sound to resonate in the interval bridging the beginning and the end of The Unnamable. When I speak of a radical experience of silence—of the Beckettian mouth at rest, as you put it—I am referring to an experience that refuses to be absorbed into yet another deterministic narrative. The resting mouth is the possibility of exhuming the end, the trace of human lucidity, the primordial freedom of discourse itself. One of the books that marked me most in my twenties was Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929). In those letters there is a constant recognition of the silence that precedes any true work, that comes before form and expression. Creation does not arise from the answer, but from that time in which nothing has yet been said.

AMB: I would say that all my projects work with the tension you mention, blurring the boundaries between true and false. One of my earliest series was titled Fallacious Memory (2014): lines and layers of plaster repeating over one another. At the time I was studying Art History and was obsessed with Peter Bürger’s view that the second avant-gardes (also known as the neo-avant-gardes) amounted to a repetition of the first avant-gardes (the historical avant-gardes), turning their gesture into a neutralised aesthetic procedure. I, on the contrary, share the perspective of Greenberg and, above all, Hal Foster, and believe in a delayed reworking on the part of the neo-avant-gardes. This reading led me to repeat the same gestures over and over again, as happened in the series Presente Passado, to see whether the repetition of the same gestures would neutralise the event or, on the contrary, rework it. And the only thing I saw were reworkings and differences. At the same time, I also perceived a loss of information which produced very different readings between works. I remember being struck, at a certain point, by the realisation that once you superimpose one layer upon another, whatever it may be, you lose access to what constitutes each of them individually. I think that was the moment when I discovered just how Foucauldian I am: I cannot believe in a single truth. Contexts change and conceal, and readings are subjective. So if “enacting the true power of the false” means confronting discourses of truth with their ignorance, provoking them, shaking their structural foundations, then yes, I gladly follow the Nietzschean school. For Nietzsche, truth is not an original datum or a foundation but a historical effect, a construction stabilised by conventions, linguistic habits, and needs regarded as vital. In his essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne, 1873), truth is defined as a set of fictions that have forgotten they are such. It is less a matter of opposing the false to the true than of displacing the very hierarchy that has made truth into an absolute value. From my work Blast Effects (2021), through the exhibition J’avale la vague qui me noie le soleil de midi (2021) to Prelude (2024), all of them question and challenge the morality of truth through this idea of the “power of the false”: the false not as an error to be corrected, but as a productive force, as that which creates new worlds. Nietzsche maintains that life depends upon illusion, appearance, fiction. The false, as a conscious fiction, has power because it affirms, invents, displaces—instead of fixing. The false, when assumed as such, becomes a field of experimentation. When it is denied or disguised as absolute truth, it turns into dogma. Here his ideology remains strikingly current: the power of the false presupposes an awareness of fiction; the problem of contemporary politics is fiction disguised as truth, suppressing any possibility of critique or displacement. Acting through the true power of the false is essential—not to abolish meaning, but to prevent it from closing in on itself. It is a practice of continuous destabilisation that stands in opposition to the dogmatism of truth.

AMB: Drawing invariably stands between the beginning and the end, and this state inscribes it within an uncontrollable atemporality that allows one to think and act freely.

AMB: I would not propose opening a dialogue about something that cannot be subverted. And discontinuity has proved to be a useful tool for subversion, creating space within failures and misalignments for discomfort. It is in that discomfort, faced with vertigo and wonder, that something may still be thought out—in that place where pure uncertainty is recognised and knowledge interrupted. If artificial intelligence does not tolerate not-knowing, poetry and art render it their greatest power for thinking beyond. The Unnamable represents an open hypothesis, an attempt, in Derridean terms, to give back to the future its right not to be anticipated, its place of mystery. To accept that we do not control the future is to subvert technocratic desires and to restore to time—and to ourselves—the freedom to happen.

AMB: To go beyond what I know.