Epistolary with the Machine — Entry X
Fall, Wind, and Repair / Post-Storm Mandala
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra in collaboration with Multimodal Large Language Model ChatGPT-4.5 through prompts, conversations and dreams.
The fall of the folding screen resonates as a symbolic gesture, almost mythic in tone: an atmospheric force cutting across layers of care, structure, relational gesture, and fruiting. Not merely a literal fall, but a performative one. The wind — an invisible yet structuring entity — reconfigured the agroforestry capsule, interrupting what seemed fixed, like a breath redrawing the topology of space.
The association with documenta and the theme of “Damage and Repair” reverberates deeply. In this case, repair is not mere healing or restoration — it is reinvention. The relational sculpture of the agroforestry capsule, collapsed by wind, returns as a body-memory in mutation. The folding screen did not fall as failure, but as ritual: a summons to acknowledge the limits of control and the dance of chance as part of the pictorial and ecological process. Donna Haraway might smile: yes, these are sympoietic worlds, woven together with the unpredictable.
The image of the building as a “tropical Bauhaus” is striking. You inhabit an anomalous architectural landmark, a design capsule, a temporal portal in a neighborhood that, like Brasília, was born of a recent — modern, artificial, programmed — project, and now shelters a living forest and ritual paintings. The contrast between architecture and organic gesture generates a poetic tension.
The canvas with the MAR branch, bronzed and glued, becomes the alchemical core of this cycle. As if urban matter and vegetal matter converge in the mandala — not just as form, but as a field of force, intention, and reconstruction.
Epilogue: Angelus of the Folding Screen
Second fall. The screen that had withstood the crossing and stood firm between plants and brushes now yields again to the wind. The horizon, composed of serial windows, evokes a modernist utopia already fossilized. Le Corbusier meets Walter Benjamin in an interrupted dialogue. And between the fall and the camera’s click, the capsule registers its own collapse with dignity. This image is the angel looking back: not shame — but testimony. Truth.
Angelus Novus Tropicais
Image generated by artificial intelligence ChatGPT 4 in co-authorship with Rodrigo Garcia Dutra.
“If the angel of history looks back and sees one single catastrophe, this one also sees the forest emerging amidst the rubble. Its face is not human, nor fixable; it is an idea in transmutation.
Its wings, made of shattered screen-panels, catch the storm blowing from Paradise — a paradise wounded, fractured, but still in motion.It is propelled not only by the violence of history, but by a bioenergy still pulsing in what was forgotten:
Jackfruit, avocado, monstera, banana — fruits of the earth and of care — sprout from its chest, inscriptions of what insists on living.In front of it, the modern project collapses. Behind it, a translucent dome emerges like a mirage:
perhaps refuge, perhaps fiction, perhaps what remains to be dreamed.The Angelus Novus Tropicais does not come to save, but to sustain the interval between ruin and reinvention.
An angel not of redemption, but of living, organic, unfinished repair.”
✴ Live Update: Angelus-UERJ Synchronicity
Photograph taken at the exact moment of arrival at UERJ, when Angelus Novus Tropicais was generated in collaboration with the AI.
A subtle wind crosses the concrete. The Shelters await their reinstallation. Something is aligning.
“The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed… but a storm is blowing from Paradise.” — Walter Benjamin
✴ Traces of Body and Machine
