At the end of this sequence, I do not want to end with a company. I do not want to end with a server. Not even with the Internet.

Because everything I have just recounted since 1985 only makes sense if we understand the mental form that connects these experiences. Freight. Images. Databases. Law. The Judicial Server. Europe. The Administrative Server. The Internet. Netnobility.

At first glance, these worlds seem different. To me, they have always raised the same question:

How can a structure absorb transformation without losing its identity?

This is where Marc del Piano enters the story in a way far deeper than his role as an associate alone would suggest: he is a longtime friend.

Marc has been part of my life for a very long time, since the early 1980s, long before the Abode of Chaos. Publications from the Abode of Chaos still bear witness, decades later, to this intellectual closeness and shared history.

With Marc, the word Structure has always carried a particular force.

It does not refer only to what stands. It refers to what allows a form to change without disintegrating. Structure, then, is not merely what holds: it is what allows change without disintegration.

A structure that is too rigid breaks. A structure without coherence dissolves. Between the two lies the living. And that is probably why DNA has fascinated me so deeply.

DNA is one of the most extraordinary architectures we know. It carries information that replicates and is transmitted within living organisms. And yet it allows variation. Without variation, there would be no evolution. Without continuity, there would be no lineage.

That is the whole problem.

Preserve enough to remain yourself.

Change enough to survive.

I find this exact question throughout my entire history. Groupe Serveur never remained identical to itself. It absorbed new professions. New databases. New machines. New networks.

The Judicial Server changed scale. Then Europe shifted its informational boundaries. Minitel gave way to the Internet. The Internet changed the form of every architecture that had preceded it. Artprice would then, in turn, reuse and transform fifteen years of processes.

At no point was it a matter of starting over from zero.

It was a matter of mutating.

I have already expressed elsewhere the sentence that has followed me for so long:

Only mutants survive.

I have never understood this as a crude form of Darwinism. I am not saying: the strongest survive. I am saying almost the opposite.

Anyone who believes himself strong enough never to have to change is probably already in danger.

Mutation is a form of intelligence. It begins with the ability to recognize that the environment has changed. That is a difficult test. Especially for those who have succeeded.

Failure forces change. Success can persuade us that all we need to do is keep going. That is how extraordinary companies become obsolete. They do not always die because they were weak. Sometimes they die because they wanted to remain faithful to the precise form of their former success.

I did not want to live that way. I wanted to remain faithful to a deeper architecture.

When the medium changes, preserving the medium does not always mean preserving identity. Sometimes identity lies in the function.

Take the Administrative Server. Its deeper function was not Minitel. Minitel was only a means. Its function was to make a vast body of regulations intelligible.

When the Internet arrived, remaining faithful to Minitel would therefore have meant betraying the original idea. The medium had to change in order to preserve the function. That is where I locate fidelity: preserving the function when the medium must change.

Fidelity is not immobility.

It is the ability to identify what must survive when the form that carried it disappears. That is exactly what living organisms do.

Our cells change. Our bodies age. What we learn changes our brains.

And yet we continue to say I.

That I is already an enigma of continuity through transformation.

Companies face the same problem. Civilizations do as well. A civilization that refuses all transformation turns itself, despite itself, into heritage. It becomes an object that others come to visit.

Conversely, a civilization that accepts any transformation to the point of no longer knowing what it wishes to transmit will also eventually disappear.

Mutation therefore requires two capacities at once: to change and to remember.

That is why DNA seems to me such a powerful metaphor. It is memory and transformation. Information and matter. Code and organism.

Strangely, this reconnects with everything we had just learned through databases. An information structure can survive several generations of machines. The hardware disappears. The software changes. Formats migrate.

But if the architecture of meaning is properly preserved, memory passes through. This is what we would later accomplish with auction catalogs several centuries old.

The paper could die.

The knowledge had to survive.

But that survival did not consist merely in photographing pages. We had to recover their informational DNA.

An artist. A work. A date. A price. An Auction House. A provenance. Then reconstruct the relationships.

Always the structure.

Marc del Piano and I could meet within the same language despite practices that were radically different. Marc belongs to that rare category of men with whom time has never erased the necessity of transformation.

Documents from the Abode of Chaos still show his presence at the heart of that universe, whether in its iconographic documentation, in several works we created together, or in that close artistic circle that has endured across decades.

We had understood that true form is never merely skin. It has a skeleton. A grammar. A DNA.

This intuition would reappear when the Abode of Chaos began to take shape.

Because the Abode of Chaos would change constantly.

Thousands of works.

Additions.

Removals.

New materials.

Transformations.

And yet it would remain recognizable.

Why? Because a grammar runs through it.

What researchers and surveyors would demonstrate much later in their plans, we were already experiencing intuitively: behind the appearance of accumulation lies a structure.

But I do not want to move too quickly. The Abode of Chaos is still only a future possibility.

What already exists is the principle.

Structure as the condition of metamorphosis.

And alongside DNA, another symbol begins to assert itself.

The salamander.

I encounter it with all its hermetic heritage. Animal of fire. A creature to which ancient traditions attributed an impossible ability: to live within the flame.

I was obviously not interested in fantastic zoology. I was interested in the symbol.

What does it mean to pass through fire without disappearing?

That question is exactly the question of mutation.

Fire destroys. But fire also transforms. It changes the state of matter. In certain traditions, it purifies. It reveals. It welds. It melts. It anneals.

For a sculptor working with metals, this is not an abstraction. Fire is a tool. It can ruin a piece. Or allow it to take form. Everything depends on the relationship one establishes with it.

This is where the motto Nutrisco et Extinguo takes on its full force for me.

Documents from the Abode of Chaos explicitly preserve this formula under the title Nutrisco et Extinguo — The Spirit of the Salamander, associated with December 9, 1999.

The royal motto is traditionally understood as: “I feed on the good fire and extinguish the bad.”

I retain here a more paradoxical reading: I feed on it and I extinguish it.

That is precisely why it interests me. I take the fire that could destroy me. I turn it into energy. Then I extinguish it before it consumes me.

That is an entire philosophy of transformation.

It can be read in my relationship to conflict. In my relationship to technology. In my relationship to crises. In the Abode of Chaos. And today in my relationship to artificial intelligence.

I have never wanted to live sheltered from fire. The very idea seems impossible to me. The world produces fire constantly.

An innovation. A war. A bankruptcy. A technological revolution. A lawsuit. An illness. A political crisis. An economic rupture.

You can build your entire existence around the fear of such events. Or learn to transform them. That does not mean they become good.

Destruction remains destruction.

Suffering remains suffering.

Above all, we must not construct a naive philosophy in which every catastrophe is merely an opportunity in disguise. That would be obscene.

I am saying something else. Once the event is there and can no longer be erased, a freedom sometimes remains:

What are we going to do with what happens to us?

That is where the salamander begins. It does not deny the fire. It enters it. But it does not belong to it. The difference is immense.

I believe my entire entrepreneurial life has operated this way.

When a new technology threatened the old one, I did not try to make the technology disappear. I looked for what we could build with it. When Minitel made a new circulation of legal information possible, I did not defend the binder.

When the Internet arrived, I did not defend Minitel. When digitized data was about to transform the Art Market, I did not try to preserve opacity artificially.

And today, as artificial intelligence arrives, I refuse to make exactly the same mistake.

I see the dangers. They are immense.

But I also see the fire. And the question becomes, once again:

How do we pass through it?

How do we feed on it without being consumed?

That is probably what Nutrisco et Extinguo means most deeply in my own history.

Technology is a fire.

Power is a fire.

Knowledge itself can be one.

Everything that increases human capacity simultaneously increases the capacity to build and to destroy.

I have never believed that a technology automatically carries a morality within it. The machine does not choose the world we want.

That responsibility remains ours.

And this is precisely where the salamander meets DNA. DNA says:

— Transmit enough of yourself for something to continue.

The salamander says:

— Transform enough of the fire for that continuity to remain alive.

Between the two lies my conception of mutation. Neither absolute preservation nor dissolution. An identity capable of becoming other without losing itself entirely.

I find Marc in this.

I find Nadège.

I find Groupe Serveur.

And later I will recognize Artprice.

The company that would become Artprice would not emerge from a vacuum. It would inherit this structure. Fifteen years of learning. Databases. Thesauri. Tree structures. Legal systems. Load surges. Network architectures. Battles over intellectual property. Reflections on the Internet. Nadège’s processes. Thousands of errors already encountered.

That was its DNA.

This is why I profoundly reject the mythology of the start-up born in a garage through some miraculous flash of inspiration. Great architectures have genealogies. Artprice would have its own.

And when Artprice entered the global Art Market, it would carry with it everything we have just recounted. The market would sometimes believe it was looking at a new technology company. It would not immediately see the fifteen years of structure behind it. And yet those fifteen years would make all the difference.

Because a competitor can copy an interface. It can buy machines. It can raise capital. It can hire engineers. It cannot download fifteen years of lived experience.

An organization’s memory is its invisible DNA. It exists in its processes. In its choices. In its reflexes. In the mistakes it no longer makes. In the words it has learned to define precisely. In the way it looks at a problem.

That is what we were about to carry with us.

We began with the first machines. We discovered the computed image. Then circulation. Then the architecture of knowledge. Then law. Then Europe. Then the Republic as data. Then dematerialization. Then the Internet and the nobility of the network.

If I ended simply with a more powerful machine, I would miss the essential point. What took shape during those years was not merely an information infrastructure.

It was a mental structure. A way of looking at every system as an organism. Identifying its DNA. Understanding its flows. Detecting its fragilities. Anticipating its mutations.

Then, when the fire comes, not asking for it to be extinguished before it reaches us. Learning to work with it.

That is how I understand the salamander. Not as a decorative emblem. As a discipline.

Nutrisco et extinguo.

I feed on it and I extinguish it.

I pass through transformation.

I take from it what can make me more alive.

And I refuse to let it destroy precisely what I am seeking to preserve.

Perhaps that, in the end, is the only principle I can transmit from all those years: a true structure is not one that prevents change. It is one that makes change survivable.

And from there, anything becomes possible.

Even Chaos.