Today, with the development of artificial intelligence and its ever-accelerating integration into productive and creative processes—domains until recently reserved for human cognition—the question of how creators might relate to their medium becomes increasingly urgent, as that medium itself becomes capable of operating as an almost autonomous creative machine.
EmonX’s Metapoesis enters and takes a position within precisely this contemporary debate concerning the complex relationship between the creative medium, whether mechanical or digital, and the subjectivity of the creator. For Pantelis, this relationship is inevitably, if not necessarily, dialectical. He approaches the machine—or, more precisely, machines, both digital and analogue—not simply as tools, but as conceptual means through which he produces not only the work itself, but also the very process that brings it into being.
The act of Metapoesis is an ongoing, living event that moves beyond the Neoplatonic schema of idea and action, in which the idea precedes action and holds a superior position. The work emerges as the trace of a continuous, active interaction between the creator and his media, their properties and possibilities, in which idea and action alternate and mutually shape one another.
Artificial intelligence participates as an initial impetus, as the tool through which the creator produces the fragments that he subsequently and dynamically reworks through a process incorporating analogue techniques and additional materials.
This process, though purposeful, is not predetermined. It discovers its aim and its telos—understood not simply as an endpoint, but as a purpose—as it takes shape through continual feedback at every moment of the creative act. The way each step builds upon the one immediately before it and guides the one that follows, the way each stitch is born of the preceding stitch and gives rise to the next, both presupposes a profound trust in the media and in the relationship with them, and affirms the dialectical nature of that relationship.
Metapoesis is an entelechial poetic engineering, a creative bricolage that interweaves and quite literally stitches together the metaphysical, the mysterious, the almost grotesque, as well as the tender and the human. It presents them as the spoils of a plundering raid into the uncharted yet fertile terrain where the creator’s intention encounters the media that bring it into being—and fearlessly allows them to reshape it.
Haris Heizanoglou
