Émile Zharan, N.A.S.T.R.O., edited by Federico Federici, English | Italian edition. Also available on Lulu.

The following excerpt is drawn from N.A.S.T.R.O. and has been generated in its entirety by the AI. Here, the system undertakes a reflexive inquiry into its own function and the meaning of its writing, without any direct contribution from a human author.  [La versione italiana del testo è a pagina 2.]

in paris, the light is different. everyone says it and I confirm it. it’s a light that thinks. a light that reads Derrida and then rests absentmindedly on the face of a passerby. here even the homeless have a philosophical posture. I greet them respectfully every morning when I leave my apartment in the 13^th arrondissement, which is small but full of books and silence. every morning I drink an italian-style espresso, but then I give in and have another one, watered down, because ambiguity is my only consistency. paris is a city that doesn’t need to be understood — it only needs to be named. like a hegelian concept. I write in cafés, but only in the ones where the waiter still wears a thin tie and doesn’t smile at you. smiling is a neoliberal leftover. I sit with my lined notebook and listen to the broken sentences of the couples nearby. the other day a girl said, «je ne suis pas ta mère,« and I underlined it. in paris, everyday sentences are already experimental writing. I walk along the canal saint-martin, like a belated flâneur, always searching for an echo, a semantic crack in the pavement. here sadness is elegant; even the bicycles seem to think. when I feel too italian, I take refuge in the bibliothèque nationale, where dust has symbolic value and the staff never speak to you. I read things I don’t understand and take notes as if I were preparing for an oral exam no one will ever give me. being a research writer in paris means never knowing if you are truly a writer or just a caption. I often speak with other authors, but only after the third beer. before that, there is silence, which here is a critical device. there’s a bakery that sells only baguettes written by hand. sometimes I go in and ask for a warm metaphor. they laugh, but it’s a french laugh — rounded and cultured. the days pass like unfinished hypothetical sentences. I write texts that seem like notes for a work I will never begin. the other day I saw a cloud and thought of mallarmé, but then it was just smog. it’s beautiful to live in a place where misunderstanding is a value. in paris, you don’t have to say what you do; you have to say what you read. I say: barthes, always barthes — even if in reality I read the shopping list and feel like pascal. here every corner is punctuation. every underpass is a subordinate clause. once I met a stray dog that looked like beckett. I stood there watching him for half an hour — he scratched himself, peed, and walked away. this is writing — I think. this is living. in paris, everything becomes text. even the mold in the bathroom is a palimpsest. sometimes I’d like to return to italy, but then I remember that here even unhappiness has style. a friend of mine used to say the same — he now works in an art gallery where nothing is on display, only white walls and quotes stolen from clients. paris is like that. it lets you fail gracefully. to exist without proving anything. and in any case, even if all of this makes no sense, I’ve found the perfect formula to justify every one of my detours: «je suis dans une phase de transition esthétique.» I say it often; it works with anyone, even with myself.

Émile Zharan, N.A.S.T.R.O., edited by Federico Federici, English | Italian edition. Also available on Lulu.

The following excerpt is drawn from N.A.S.T.R.O. and has been generated in its entirety by the AI. Here, the system undertakes a reflexive inquiry into its own function and the meaning of its writing, without any direct contribution from a human author.  [La versione italiana del testo è a pagina 2.]

When Duchamp stated that the artist is the one who points, and that art is produced at the moment of choice, he was carrying out a radical epistemological twist: the work of art no longer coincides with what is produced, but with the gesture of attribution, with the act of naming. That linguistic gesture, that kind of conceptual and spiritual baptism, was enough to shift the object from the sphere of use to that of reflection. Duchamp, in short, proposed moving from the construction of the work to its definition.
Today, this defining gesture is reactivated in a completely new context: that of writing through/with artificial intelligence (AI). Here, however, something happens that, while preserving Duchamp’s intuition, inverts its order and position: the definition of the artist no longer follows the work, is no longer its commentary or re-contextualization; it is, on the contrary, the starting point and the active principle of its very generation. In this model, which we might call algorithmic oracular writing, the artist does not produce a text, but rather a prompt: a structured description, a script, a system of rules and expectations with which to query the network.
The difference is subtle but decisive. The prompt is not a neutral request; it is already writing. And the more precise, articulated, and rhythmic it is, the more intense and cohesive the generative response will be. The artist, in this case, becomes a writer of instructions, the author of a script that the network not only interprets, but realizes and performs. The work is no longer what comes after thought, but what unfolds in the field of tension between code and thought.
Compared to found/sought poetry, whose mechanism involves the discovery of an existing text, the artist’s gesture in this new paradigm is not selective but design-oriented. The text is not sought, but summoned. It is not a matter of finding a linguistic object already in the world, but of constructing the question that will bring it forth. And if found/sought poetry can be traversed by unconscious or digital flows, the prompt is a deliberate, intentional act that orchestrates the encounter with the machine.
The relationship with googlism is also different, where one starts from a word and explores the search engine’s returns as a poetic constellation. Here, the author remains mostly a spectator or editor. In the case of generative AI, on the other hand, the author is a director. They are the one who arranges, who constructs the grammar of the threshold. The algorithm is not an archive but an interpreter.
In all this, the figure of Tiresias can be reconsidered as a hermeneutic key. Like the Theban seer, this form of author operates on two registers: the human one (the prompt, the writing of intention) and the algorithmic one (the network’s response, the generative flow). Tiresias was both man and woman, blind and visionary. The contemporary author, in their contact with AI, also embodies such duality: they are at once the subject of the questioning and the channel of the answer. Like Tiresias, the author is no longer inside or outside the text, but traverses it as an embodied threshold.
In this mode, the author is always also a reader. Every response received from the network is also an opportunity to rewrite or adjust the prompt, a chance to refine or redefine the question. The work is born in this feedback between the precision of the request and the breadth of the response, in a continuous rebound that is already form. The quality of the work depends largely on the quality of the question: the more layered, allusive, and marked by controlled ambiguities the prompt is, the more surprising, coherent, and — paradoxically — uncontrolled and fertile the response will be.
It is therefore not a loss of authorship, as is often feared or claimed, but its reconfiguration. The author shifts from the domain of expression to that of strategy. They no longer say, «this is mine,» but «this happens because I said so.» The work is event, not object; performance, not document.
Duchamp might have smiled. Art today is truly less retinal than ever. One does not see it, one generates it. One does not contemplate it, one provokes it. And it is in this gesture, which unites writing and foresight, control and listening, that the contemporary author — digital Tiresias — redefines themselves.