"Adagio", a composition played at a slow tempo.
Adagio is clockwork poetry, and a time-stopping mesmerizing animation.
With relentless slowness a swarm of particles evolves into symbolic shapes, then into a poem, every hour, embodying the materiality of the passage of time.
Each artwork in this series will create exactly 24 generative poems describing the interaction of an object with the time.
At the beginning of each hour, at minute 0, the poem is perfectly legible. It lasts an instant, then the particles start to move again according to oneiric patterns, they disaggregate the poem, then recompose a new one after one hour.

All the generative poems are different, but all Adagios in the world are synchronized and obey the same strict temporal rules: at the same absolute universal time they stop building the poem and an instant later they start destroying it. It also means that each day, a single Adagio will show exactly the same image at the same time. Forever and ever.

The generated verses follow rules of classical poetic metrics (accentual-syllabic rhythm): each poem is an octave composed of blank iambic pentameters, except the first three verses, which are anapestic tetrameters emphasizing the slow rhythm of the past. A single work of art concerns a single real-life object and will show 24 poems on the theme of the relationship of that object with time.


During the animation you can save to a file the current frame, by pressing the "s" key.

WARN: The variations you see on this page are for the purpose of exhibition only: they are displayed as they would appear at a specific time of the day.