The camera—
that profoundly liberal invention—
whispers:

I’m ready for anything.
Give me chemicals, give me a little light,
give me time and no shaking,
and I will be done.

A pocket-sized Enlightenment,
believing every world is reachable,
every surface printable,
every body open to possibility.

And now generative machines produce punctum—
yes, Barthes’ punctum—
the involuntary meaning that slips through
the cracks of intention.
Not planned by the author,
nor by the algorithm,
but arriving later,
after you’ve slept on it,
after the dopamine subsides.
Fast food for intellectual minds,
rewarding at first bite,
quickly stale.
You return in the morning and mutter:
It was not that great after all.

Style appears.
Style overload.
Those who lack craft run toward it—
high, abstract, fast—
while you work the old way,
learning the hand,
the long path,
refusing to choose sides.

Spend time with it—
real duration—
and you’ll see how expensive time has become.
Only unproductive duration is free.
Yet we abandoned that when we entered the cinema,
trading mobility for the promise of instant return.
No one waits for tomorrow in a theater.
In a museum, though—
time’s ticking clock can’t be heard.
There we look forward to looking back.

And somewhere in this,
the black box—
practical, yes,
but also a symptom
of our incapacity to coexist.
The dark room becomes a social problem,
a refusal of interference,
a denial of shared space.

Everything becomes a question of time,
of how little we have left,
of how duration is mined
like ore.

Growing old treated as disease,
dementia as enemy,
while software dreams
of pure disembodiment—
young, innocent, clean.

And yet—
beneath all this—
you remind us:
we are bifocal,
split,
never individuals.
We are believers,
especially visually.

The camera says:
I’m ready for anything.

But the eye says:
I am not a camera.

And the brain says:
I choose no side.

And the forest says:
Take your time.

And the weak image
whispers from the periphery:
Here is the non-event—
stay long enough, and you may hear it breathe.

+++

The text above is an artistic experiment inspired by the insights David Claerbout shared in his presentation Reclaiming Our Agency and in BIRDSONG, the publication accompanying the premiere of The Woodcarver and the Forest at the Castle of Gaasbeek in August 2025.

I first edited the full transcript from the presentation, and then OCR scanned text ‘The Time Spent” from the BIRDSONG book. Then I made a personal selection of the sentences that resonated with me. Then I gave that to ChatGPT and asked it to condense all this into a 1000-word poem, then 500 words, then 100 words. Then again, I made a personal selection of the best GPT snippets. And further edited them to my personal (un)taste.