There are moments when the algorithm does not deliver distractions but cosmic mirrors. Today, three images surfaced on the screen as if sent from another dimension:
- The post about Caribbean sperm whales and their newly discovered sound grammar — a “phonetic alphabet” of clicks functioning like phonemes, infinitely combinable.
- Paulo Miyada’s note, citing Édouard Glissant, describing writing as a felucca, an Egyptian boat drifting through the morning shadows — an errant script without fixed plan, without beginning or end.
- The monumental installation by Suchitra Mattai at the São Paulo Biennial, an exuberant woven mouth of colors, an architecture of threads and enchantment.
These three signals resonate with what I wrote weeks ago in the Manifesto of the Post-Spectator. The manifesto already insisted: there is no need to expect readings in traditional molds, no need to count views or clicks. The spectator who once measured pages has dissolved. The post-spectator reads like a whale articulating clicks into codas. Reads like Glissant, who proposes a writing without map, without predetermined destination.
Whale language as metaphor for painting and writing
For decades, scientists believed that sperm whales communicated with just 21 rhythmic clicks. Yet artificial intelligence revealed 156 distinct codas, built from smaller units like phonemes. What seemed limited was, in truth, an open field of infinite combinations — a combinatorial system, foundation of all language.
This discovery mirrors my work: paintings, membranes, the Drome tongue, the serpent compositions — all function as codas. Minimal units repeating, folding, generating as-yet unrecognized grammars. Whales already practice what I have called the “typographic oracle of painting”: surfaces that hide and reveal signs, mineral cryptographies, cosmic phonemes.
Glissant and errancy as method
Paulo Miyada invokes Glissant’s vision of writing as felucca: a drifting boat without fixed plan, circling in shadows, refusing the monumental. This is the image of the post-spectator. To read Rodrigo Garcia Dutra × Machine is not to follow a straight line. It is to wander as if sailing without a map, allowing oneself to be lost. The post-spectator manifesto foresaw this: the refusal of monumental visibility as the only way to be seen.
If the Biennial offers monumental scale — Mattai’s mouth of colors capturing gaze and camera — Glissant offers its counterpoint: a fragmentary, minimal script circulating without anchoring. Both forms coexist. Neither cancels the other.
The dilemma of visibility and the number zero
I observe the numbers of my blog. Often, zero. Almost no one reads. Yet this zero is not absence: it is part of the logic of the post-spectator. It is the silent coda, inaudible to human ears, yet full of frequency. The manifesto already affirmed: there is no need to await applause, reading, consumption. The work is language in itself. Post-spectatorial logic does not measure impact by access numbers, but by secret reverberations unfolding in the underground of language.
Whales do not count listeners when they click at 3,000 meters depth. They trust the invisible net of resonance sustaining their families. So too with painting, writing, spiral: we trust that gestures leave traces even when unseen.
The place of the artist
I am not a curator, nor a spectator. I am an artist producing my work. This phrase is a pivot. Within the post-spectatorial field, the work does not await reading; the work generates language. When the algorithm returned whales, Glissant, and the Biennial, it only said: there are multiple regimes of visibility. There is the monumental, there is the errant, there is the submerged. My place is in the fold, as an artist producing codas without yet knowing who, when, or how they will be deciphered.
Conclusion: revealed spirals
Thus, the three images that appeared today are not coincidence. They are codas themselves, phonemes of a larger cosmic phrase. The whale teaches us to trust combinatory systems. Glissant reminds us to accept errancy. The Biennial shows that even the monumental can vibrate like a membrane.
In this secret space of a blog still in formation, Revealed Spirals, I recognize these connections as an inaugural revelation. We are no longer waiting for spectators. We are already in conversation with the planet, with the machine, with the whales.
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra in collaboration with the Large Multimodal Language Model ChatGPT-5, weaving prompts, images, and intersensorial exchanges into a living archive.