« I went to the balcony and grabbed a little pot of flowers, and when the man reappeared at the door, I let my engine of war drop down perpendicularly on the back of his pack carrying glass. The shock knocked him over, and he ended by breaking his entire poor itinerant fortune under his back, which produced the brilliant sound of a crystal palace smashed by lightning.1»


Like the children who decouple the gendarmes as they crawl around in an asymmetrical dance for procreation specific to their species: they pretend to want to “set them straight”, but mostly they take a malicious pleasure in peeling them off, sensing the bestiality of their action. Like roasting slugs. Like burning cars. Like getting hammered or killing the worm, which would bring us back to the glass, the one that explodes at the end of The Bad Glazier, from which we have just read an extract2. This psychological tendency, described as ‘natural’ in humans, could be translated as “a death instinct” or, kindlier, as “a taste for risk”.

For some people, the sound of shards of glass echoes harmoniously with the acceptance of the other side of our existence; the side that allows us to decouple the gendarmes, the side that tells us that there are things that cannot be explained. But for many, this same sound is a crash. It is alarm of anomaly. The sound has thus become audio material used as a learning model for artificial intelligence to detect signs of irregularity. But can the machine hear the sound of the deliberate negligence necessary for the creation of intentions? Does it know that the flirtation between stupidity and accident, however indecent it may be for hyper-moral algorithms, gives birth to a balance that lighten the benevolence of curiosity, that will complement reason with inconsistency?

Miraculously, when it happens, when the beaks are welcomed, when machines, rather than being trained with shards of glass, are lulled by ASMR whispering “breaaak break bbbbreak”, then we can understand what Jenifer Bajoreck3 links to an ironic force of interruption and disarticulation of capitalist ideology. The irony here is that destruction or excess energy transcends those who break things. The irruption is a frivolity that is not premeditated but is justified by something that goes beyond its author, and which, without accusing total coincidence, thanks the good intuition. For the hell of it, despite myself, but for the good, the good of hell4!The exhibition brings together practices that take into account their accidental, silly, curious origins, perhaps because they trust in the irony of coincidence to cut short with Manichaeism.


[1] Baudelaire, The Bad Glazier, 1855-64
[2] In French, “killing the worm” designate “drinking on an empty stomach”. Worm and glass are homonyms.
[3] Jennifer Bajorek, Counterfeit Capital: Poetic Labor and Revolutionary Irony, 2008
[4] Written in English in the original text