[ F. J. M. ]
You have an unusual career path: you trained as an engineer, which didn’t predestine you for a career in the arts. How did you come to art?

[ P. D. ]
It’s fair to say my path is atypical —I studied engineering, not art. But even at high school I painted and exhibited works inspired by Surrealism. I kept painting and exhibiting during my degree. When I graduated, I spent a year at Tufts University, Boston, which had a partnership with Boston Museum School. That was where I first encountered techniques like engraving, video, and computer art, but my first try at digital creation hardly won me over! [laughs]

 [ F. J. M. ]
Why not?

[ P. D. ]
It was a pretty frustrating experience due to the limits of the materials. But as it turned out, that frustration was a fundamental step in my journey: I swapped my paintbrushes for algorithms, striving to create without the limits set by the machine and its technical constraints, so I opted for a minimalist, lowtech solution. Coding my own algorithms let me get straight to the nub of the matter, and that is where my background in engineering came in useful. To this day, I still maintain the same critical distance and I even remain wary of technology.

[ F. J. M. ]
In 2007, Frank Popper described your move from painting to digital art as “techno-hyperirrationality.” Is that a fair assessment?

[ P. D. ]
Yes, insofar as my aim is to hijack rational processes for irrational ends. Back in the 1990s, I used digital machines to try and generate the unexpected by destabilizing systems programmed to be unshakeable. My starting point was the simple yet powerful iterative principle of fractal loops. With a few lines of code, a basic instruction like “draw the arc of a circle” can generate an infinite number of unpredictable visual worlds. I used that excess to create critical distance from the machine and invent my own artistic language. The “techno-hyperirrationality” described by Popper is a means, not an end.

[ F. J. M. ]
This new artistic language also drew on other sources. Which artists helped you establish your artistic identity?

[ P. D. ]
Lots. Of the old masters, I have a passion for Lorenzo Lotto and El Greco. I am fascinated by Lotto’s use of anagrams, his flattened spatial perspectives that put me in mind of Matisse, and the inner psychology of his portraits. And El Greco’s dissonant colors and the construction of space.
Of the 20th-century modernists, I admire those who created their own language and developed it over time. When I started out, I could see myself taking the same journey and it helped me develop my artistic identity.

[ F. J. M. ]
Yes, of course, the 20th century too… Which artists do you have in mind?

[ P. D. ]
Mondrian was important to me. I was struck by his shift from figurative to abstract art and his New York works with colored adhesives. Postwar American artists like Pollock, Ad Reinhardt and Rothko were another influence, especially Frank Stella. I found his early Black Paintings quite stunning. They are visually extremely impressive, though imperfect, letting the painting breathe, like Mondrian.
I was also influenced by artists working on similar themes to mine, like Sol LeWitt. I admire how he combines a rigorous process with a powerful visual result, going beyond the instructions of his Wall Drawings to introduce color and subjectivity. Artists working with algorithms, like François Morellet, Manfred Mohr and Vera Molnar, are also crucial for me. You can tell their work at first glance. It is stimulating and constructive to understand what sets their artistic identity apart when they are using what would seem to be a pretty similar process.

[ F. J. M. ]
As you say, Vera Molnar and Manfred Mohr are artists whose work is important to you and who, like Morellet, introduce the idea of chance. Is that a fundamental part of your work?

[ P. D. ]
Yes, chance is central to my practice. Scientists long sought to prove that there is no such thing, but quantum mechanics demonstrates that it does exist. In daily life, chance is mainly about what can’t be calculated. For instance, throwing dice is a chance event since the outcome depends on too many factors to be predictable.
This relationship between chance and excess is what I explore by using computers. Their processing power means that looping a simple instruction generates unexpected results not predicated in the opening instruction. It generates randomness. But as for any other repetitive process, you have to know when to stop, before what Severo Sarduy called the “black-out.” That is where the artist comes in, making a subjective choice from thousands of possibilities, just like Morellet, Mohr and Molnar.
It was actually William Burroughs and his cut-ups that really helped me understand the use of chance. By combining texts at random, he sought to free language from its constraints, but he adjusted the proportion of cut-out fragments to more linear extracts in such a way as to preserve the opacity of the text while making it readable. A balance of control and chance.

[ F. J. M. ]
You also regularly name-check the GRAV group¹ whose works and installations — I am thinking particularly of Labyrinthe — foreshadowed the social upheavals of 1968… They trigger visual, auditive, and bodily instability in viewers to induce them to consider societal issues. Is your modus operandi similar?

[ P. D. ]
Yes. In a way, I do set out to create instability to unsettle the viewer. That said, the societal issue you mention is less present in my work. I think the way GRAV and similar movements worked was closely bound up with ideas that were prominent in the 1960s — changing the world, rejecting the consumer society and capitalism. That was some fifty years ago now, and in the meantime we have seen the end of the modernist adventure, postmodernism, the “end of history,” and now the end, or rather ends, of the world! These days, the societal context has clearly changed. In comparison, my work is more focused on the stakes of man vs. machine and the multiple ends yet to come.

[ F. J. M. ]
Your 2024 solo exhibition at the DAN Galeria Contemporânea, São Paulo, presented Spin Machine, a monumental lenticular sculpture that gestures to kinetic art as it spins.

[ P. D. ]
Yes, absolutely! Spin Machine consists of a single suspended line of ten boxes, set at angles to each other to create the impression that the work is rolling itself up as it slowly rotates.
The nod to kinetic art in the rotating black and white shapes is clear. The sculpture can be linked to Marcel Duchamp’s rotating sculptures and Naum Gabo’s kinetic pieces. But to me, it is also building on my work on spiral forms, begun in my early work on algorithms. The structure is close to unraveled DNA. It speaks of non-linearity, the lack of a beginning and an end, and the multiplicity of points of view.

[ F. J. M. ]
Personally, I clearly see in it the flicker principle, as in Gysin’s Dream Machine.

[ P. D. ]
I find the Dream Machine absolutely fascinating. It is very low-tech, just a record player spinning a paper cylinder with cut-outs. It reflects both 1960s psychedelia and the broader, universal history of flicker and of psychological perception. Its radical nature lies in the fact that you look at it with your eyes closed, exploring the relationship between the visible and the invisible, which is an important theme for me. I am also thinking about Ad Reinhardt, who thought of his own paintings as invisible and unreproducible. My work, particularly my interactive walls with a flow of images revealed by lenticular sheets, explores the visibility of the contemporary images that are everywhere on our screens but that we see less and less as they are all scanned, seen, and analyzed by machines.

[ F. J. M. ]
As early as the 1950s, concreteartists in Brazil like Waldemar Cordeiro — followed by neo-concrete artists like Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica in the 1960s — developed works that had a significant impact on the country’s cultural life, in the visual arts, literature, and music. You know the movement well, having often traveled to Brazil.Is the geometry of such Brazilian artists another source of inspiration?

[ P. D. ]
What I find most interesting and inspiring is the way such artists use geometry, like Lygia Clark’s Bichos, where simple forms combine to form objects that can be handled and reshaped to create multiple perspectives and their own space-time. There is no front or back to the Bichos, they develop their own dimensions and stand or fall on their own folds. Lygia Pape too played with similar ideas with her installations of thread that transform space. What interests me in their work is their journey from concrete geometric art to works that incorporate politics and subjectivity. Waldemar Cordeiro in particular developed in the direction of digital art, using computers to transform photographic images. In that respect, I see him as a bridge between Andy Warhol’s silk-print pop art and the images now produced by generative AI.

[ F. J. M. ]
In recent years, your output has evolved, particularly in terms of the use of color. After your early series, like Hyper-Structures, Mikado_Xplosion and Irrational Geometrics, I get the impression that your use of colors has shifted from pictoriality to autonomy of color. They seem more self-assured and you seem more at ease using them.

[ P. D. ]
I’ve always had a special relationship with color. Pre-digital, when I was still painting, I loved to make my own colors from pigments. My maternal grandparents lived in Nice, where in the old center there was a shop that sold nothing but pigments. I recall the delight of choosing the purest colors, intense reds, deep purples, and cobalt blues.
Initially, when I began coding algorithms, my relationship with color changed. I used it more to foreground a process and create forms and rhythms, rather than explore its nature per se. The work was about lines of color, not surfaces. In recent years, I have returned to the enjoyment of color. Now, it is often the starting point for my works. For instance, my latest series, Post-Digital Mirror and Post-Digital Surface, explore color gradations echoing thermography, connected to global warming. I also took inspiration from the colors of dusk and the orange hues in some works by Rothko that I returned to recently. My use of color has become less focused on lines, less about the index, more pictorial.

[ F. J. M. ]
You have been working with lenticular media for over twenty years. It has become your hallmark. What first interested you in the technique, and how has your use of it developed over time?

[ P. D. ]
When I first began my digital work, I was looking for the materiality of painting, because digital images seemed to me too smooth and cold. I explored various techniques, like using resin to stick laser prints to Plexiglas and printing on rice paper to cause paper jams. During that experimental process I came across lenticular technology and was immediately drawn to its instability and natural propensity to generate randomness, matching my way of programming fractal algorithms. Lenticular tech produces an illusion of depth of field beyond the material surface, connecting the image with painting, while generating movement linked to the viewer’s position, like video. It took me years to master the technique, refining the software procedures and methods of laminating and understanding how the lenses behaved in optical terms. Even now it still has the capacity to surprise me, making me constantly question how I work with it as a medium. For instance, in Bangkok, I recently created an immersive work 25 meters in perimeter, calling for new techniques to handle the optical effects of curving.

[ F. J. M. ]
Yes, the Bangkok installation is impressive! And highly effective, as it is in a space plenty of people pass through. Movement is a common thread in your work — could you tell us why?

[ P. D. ]
Maybe because I find it hard to sit still! [Laughs]
Seriously, though, the common thread is not so much the idea of movement as the idea of multiple points of view. I think a work of art needs to be dynamic, in the sense of offering viewers several shapes, several colors, and it should not be static but have the capacity to regenerate. That matches my vision of today’s world, which is more and more complex, no longer white OR black, good OR bad: instead, AND is key, so white AND black, man AND woman, good AND bad.
Attaining multiple perspectives means moving around in front of the works. Each viewer then has their own individual experience and their position is what triggers the work into action. I am thrilled by the idea that two people can look at my work and not see the same thing because they are standing in separate places.

[ F. J. M. ]
…Text as matter augmented by lenticular technology…

[ P. D. ]
Yes, I love the idea that lenticular tech produces moving text that in turn generates new texts by word association… and the fact that this movement leaves traces and generates remanence. There is a temporal dimension bound up with movement that creates the impression of a text in the process of being written.

[ F. J. M. ]
You work concurrently on “static” pieces and on videos. How do you move from one series to another?

[ P. D. ]
My usual process is to take time and let my works mature, setting a series aside to come back to later with fresh eyes. Working on static pieces and videos hones my gaze and stimulates my creativity. For instance, my most recent “static” lenticular monochromes arose from a dialogue between my print and video work. In affixing lenticular panels to video screens, I had to compensate for the lack of resolution in the video, compared to what I get from printing, by playing dynamically with the optical settings of the lenticular lenses, like focusing a camera lens. I realized that it modifies shapes, curves lines, and impacts the color gradation. Now I use the process in my print works, exploring the potential of such optical effects to enrich the visitor’s visual perception and play with the boundary between static images and movement.

[ F. J. M. ]
You have been using new technologies in the digital arts sphere for nearly thirty years. Is it fair to describe your work as “generative art”?

[ P. D. ]
I use algorithms to create works that are not determined in advance. So yes, I come into the generative art field, which also includes lots of non-digital artists — I am thinking of the likes of Morellet and LeWitt. The idea of generative art, particularly with the recent development of generative AI, also carries the notion of an autonomous work, like a living organism. My work begins with processes that are autonomous, in which, in a way, the machine takes the lead in making proposals. But there is always a second stage in which I choose, discard, select, and take back control. The machine proposes, I dispose [laughs]. So the finished work is not fully autonomous. It is generative and arbitrary art on which I impose and imprint constraints.

[ F. J. M. ]µ
What about AI? You have always used data as raw material. What is your view of the advent of AI in society and in creative practice?

[ P. D. ]
I think I have always done AI without AI! I use vast data sets — lines of color, texts, and images — to create processes that generate random, unexpected outcomes and thereby new forms. The forms are not drawn or written intentionally: I create the conditions for them to emerge. The randomness is deliberate, but the final outcome remains unpredictable, a bit like today’s generative AI, “black boxes” whose workings we don’t quite understand and that are developing at exponential speed. Some see AI as a new Renaissance, but that’s not how I see it. It does raise fascinating questions about human intelligence and our relationship with machines, I grant you, but its uncontrolled development is also like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the apprentices being a handful of tech businesses, and its energy footprint, largely hidden, runs counter to crucial efforts to decarbonize.

But it is also true that generative AI gives artists new forms of expression and establishes new paradigms. Personally, it puts me in mind of the random techniques that have always captivated artists, like Alexander Cozens in the 18th century, who generated über-Romantic imaginary landscapes from blots of ink on paper. For Cozens, ink blots acted as prompts! A step backwards or sideways is needed to use technologies, as argued by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who considers that the true contemporary is at slight temporal odds with his day and looks at the darkness of his times rather than that which is fully in the light.

[ F. J. M. ]
Do you see AI becoming direct competition for artists, or even replacing them?

[ P. D. ]
No, I think artists are the specimens of humanity facing the least threat from AI [laughs]. Generative AI can produce text, images and sounds, of course, but all it does is remix extant data on a statistical basis. To explore and interpret a constantly changing world, letting everyone generate their own visual and metaphorical experiences, the artist’s role is not reproducing or optimizing, like AI does, but creating new languages outright.

[ F. J. M. ]
Your 2023 video piece Obsolete Writing looks at the future obsolescence of text. Do you really believe writing will die out?

[ P. D. ]
Personally, I think it is bound to! I see writing as a living organism, born several thousand years ago, that developed with technology and will eventually go extinct. Burroughs thought of it as a virus. Our species lived without writing for tens of thousands of years, developing symbolic thought, mythologies, religions, and art. Writing arose in Mesopotamia for administrative documents and in China for predictions. It gained speed with printing and now the digital era. But the same technologies will cause it to die out. Today, thanks to generative AI in particular, we can already dialogue with machines without text. The end of writing seems to be ineluctably programmed, but to paraphrase Ad Reinhardt, “the end of writing is not the end”! [laughs], and it will open up new means of communication other than text. So writing might become a curiosity, like a dead language.

[ F. J. M. ]
The end of writing, the end of art, and the endings of films in your work The End(less)… Why the obsession with ends? You have adopted Ad Reinhardt’s maxim “the end of art is not the end”. What is its scope?

[ P. D. ]
Ad Reinhardt’s maxim, which I have taken up in some of my most recent works, dates from 1965. I see it as questioning “ends of”. To me, it means we can escape a kind of determinism, imagine a future of infinite, necessary ends, either to keep creating art or simply to survive on this planet. I honestly think that this idea of multiple ends is what characterizes the times we are living through: between the end of modernism, the “end of history” and the growing perception of the coming end of the world in ecological collapse. I began my career as an artist in the 1980s, at a time shaped by the end of modernism, and understanding that history was at an end was a real disappointment. Postmodernism was not my thing. That is why I turned to algorithms, because I saw them as a chance to create new forms of expression along with a new visual vocabulary… And today, we are facing the climate crisis and the rise of AI, two existential threats to humanity that we must confront. That means we must continue exploring a universe of potential ends. I see it as crucial, in order to keep moving forward and inventing new creative languages.

[1] The Paris-based GRAV, Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (Research Group on Visual Art), 1960-68, consisted of the South American artists Garcia-Rossi, Le Parc, and Sobrino and the French artists Morellet, Stein and Yvaral.

Pascal Dombis. Post-Digital, Skira, 2025, p. 10 to 20, translated by Susan Pickford