There comes a very particular moment in the life of a work when the author ceases to be the one holding the camera. Until then, with 999, we had constructed our own path of transmission from within. Étienne Perrone had directed it from my screenplay; the film organized the shots, the rhythms, the images, the silences, and the linguistic versions to bring the Abode of Chaos out of Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d’Or and into other consciousnesses. But a work that truly begins to exist in the world sooner or later encounters a much more dangerous and much more fertile ordeal: it becomes the object of others' gaze.

It is a strange experience for an author who has spent so much time defending the coherence of his cosa mentale. I explained in previous chapters that the conceptual act was not shared, that companions could enrich the incarnation without becoming the authors of this thought, that even the integration of external works had been refused almost systematically so that the Abode of Chaos would never become a park where different plastic consciousnesses would come to be juxtaposed.

However, the outside perspective cannot be forbidden. And above all, it must not be. A work that no one could interpret other than its author would be a monumental monologue. I did not want that. I wanted a work structured enough to resist interpretation, that is, not to dissolve when someone looks at it differently than I do.

The cosa mentale governs production.

It does not govern the viewer's consciousness.

This separation preserves the author's authority while allowing for free interpretation. When television arrived, when a journalist walked through the Abode of Chaos, when a Korean director tried to understand this place from his own cultural perspective, when a man like Paul Bocuse, who obviously did not need anyone to explain to him what a work produced over time is, came to observe, each person constructed a slightly different Abode of Chaos.

Not another work. Another reading of the same work.

I find this difference extraordinarily beautiful because it gives the external gaze a dignity that does not encroach upon that of the author.

The author creates the syntax; the viewer produces the sentence.

The first major lesson from the reports devoted to the Abode of Chaos was precisely this: the outside camera never sees what my camera sees. Even when it is positioned in the same place. A director arrives with a pre-defined question. An editor has envisioned an angle. A program has an audience, a duration, an editorial line. Some programs seek out the bizarre, others heritage, still others the personality of the author, the legal conflict, the spectacular, the architecture, the visitors, or the Art Market.

None of these angles is necessarily wrong. But none is sufficient.

I gradually learned not to expect a news report to contain the entire work. That would be as absurd as asking a photograph to simultaneously show all its sides. A medium can only open a window.

The only serious question, therefore, is: does this window honestly show what it chooses to frame?

This rule guided my relationship with journalists. I never expected them to become spokespeople for my doctrine. Above all, I did not want communication where every sentence was pre-approved to produce a perfectly controlled image. That would have destroyed precisely the value of the outside perspective. But I did expect one thing: that people would come and truly see. That they would not decide what the Abode of Chaos is before they even entered.

I often found myself facing people who arrived with a very strong preconceived notion, shaped by photographs, articles, or the legal conflict. Then I would see them physically change as they moved through the space. There was almost always this moment when their prepared speech slowed down. Scale came into play. Detail came into play. Coherence emerged.

Someone might have come to film what they imagined to be visual chaos and gradually begin to ask how certain perspectives had been constructed, why a particular symbol recurred, how the works interacted with one another. It is this moment that interests me more than the reportage itself: the instant when the gaze ceases to apply its grid and begins to receive the object.

There is an ethics of looking involved here.

We spend our lives classifying what we encounter extremely quickly because our brain needs to save time.

New or old.

Beautiful or ugly.

Art or decoration, heritage or vandalism, madness or method.

These categories protect us from the vertigo produced by what we do not yet know how to name.

The Abode of Chaos has often been a victim of this haste precisely because its immediately perceptible nature allowed everyone to form a judgment before even seeing the system. I did not necessarily blame them. It is a universal cognitive process. But I wanted to create the conditions that would allow people to move beyond this initial reaction.

A fairly long visit usually transforms the question "what is it?" into a much more interesting one: "how does it all hold together?"

And as soon as this second question appears, the perspective has already shifted.

Envoyé spécial represents a special stage for me because French television meets the Abode of Chaos over time and because time ends up adding something that no first report could possess: hindsight.

The Abode of Chaos has existed long enough for the older images to now be compared with contemporary ones. This is a rare experience in contemporary art. Many works are presented for one season, dismantled, and stored elsewhere. Here, the camera can return to the same space twenty years later and observe that the work has continued to evolve.

The media then unwittingly assumes the role of an archivist.

It thought it was there to report on the present; the images it produced have, over the years, become historical documents of the site's former state. We find exactly what I was saying about 999. Every image of the Abode of Chaos has a double life: it shows the present and it documents the future.

When a television returns after years, this property appears visible. It can place two states of the same organism side by side. And suddenly the viewer understands something that a single viewing cannot make so clear: time itself is part of the work.

This distance also transforms the way journalists themselves look at things. In the early years, one question might have dominated: what is this place? Twenty years later, a new question arises: how has this place managed to last?

This displacement is immense. The duration creates a particular form of proof.

It does not automatically prove artistic merit, of course; mistakes can persist for a very long time. But it gradually eliminates certain simplistic interpretations.

One can treat a one-off intervention as provocation. It becomes much more difficult to seriously apply this category to a work pursued daily for more than a quarter of a century, documented, theorized, transformed, studied, photographed, visited by millions of people.

Time forces our gaze to seek another category. This is one of the great strengths of time: it exhausts certain misunderstandings.

The world sometimes ends up looking more slowly simply because the object has refused to disappear.

Paul Bocuse belongs to a different kind of perspective. He was a neighbor. Only a few kilometers separated us. This proximity might seem almost anecdotal when considering the global reach of the Abode of Chaos, but it is, on the contrary, very important. Great stories never unfold solely in capital cities. They have neighbors.

Bocuse was one of the most globally recognizable French figures, yet he remained deeply rooted in his region. This connection to his homeland resonated with me. He understood what it means to forge a global identity without erasing the place from which it originates.

A cuisine can travel the world and yet remain tied to a specific geography, to certain products, to a tradition, to a home. The Abode of Chaos embodies something of this logic. One might imagine that a work so connected to the world, to networks, to wars, to China, to the United States, and to data would eventually become abstractly international. It never is. It is irrevocably located in Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d’Or.

Its potential universality does not come from the erasure of this place but from its intensification.

Bocuse intuitively understood this paradox because his own work had experienced it differently. The local is not the opposite of the global. Something distinctly local can achieve global resonance. I have always preferred this conception to that of a globalization that homogenizes. A work does not need to resemble the entire world to speak to the entire world. It simply needs to be sufficiently precise in its context.

The proximity to Bocuse also produced something very concrete: the Abode of Chaos became a place where international figures who had met in this exceptional Lyon environment could pass through. Again, I do not want to turn this chapter into a social commentary. The point is not to say who came. It is to understand that some people arrive with a worldly experience that alters their perception of the work.

A chef who has dedicated his life to materials, transformations, time, and transmission does not necessarily view a place in the same way as a theorist. He knows that an abstract creation always depends on extremely precise execution. He also knows that the daily repetition of a gesture is often what builds the most lasting reputation.

This close connection between trades has always interested me. I often feel closer to a great craftsman or a great chef in their field than to certain artistic discourses that have completely detached themselves from the material. Know-how is never secondary when thought must become reality. We saw this with the companions.

Bocuse's gaze reminded me of this in a different way: there are people who immediately understand that a Total Work of Art is not created by a few spectacular ideas but by a daily discipline of decades.

Then the world came from further afield. With MBC Korea, the difference in references itself became instructive. The director did not arrive with the same questions as a French journalist; some local assumptions ceased to be so, while other aspects of the place took on a new significance.

This discrepancy taught me that the internationalization of a work is not just about expanding its audience: it can also defamiliarize it.

A culturally detached perspective can liberate the work from certain local disputes that had ultimately tainted its perception. For someone arriving from Korea, the battle over French urban planning is not necessarily the central entry point. They see first what is in front of them.

This distance is precious. It resets the perspective.

It sometimes places the work in a global context where we had ended up, locally, reducing it to an administrative or legal conflict. I remember this feeling several times: sometimes we had to travel ten thousand kilometers symbolically to simply look at what was right in front of us.

Mr. Lee and the MBC team arrived with their own television codes, their own questions, their own relationship to spectacle. And I, in turn, could watch The Abode of Chaos through this foreign filter.

The phenomenon is very interesting for an author: the other does not only show you what he sees; he shows you what your own culture no longer sees.

We become terribly accustomed to our surroundings very quickly. I can walk through an area of the Abode of Chaos every day and no longer experience the initial strangeness of a sculpture because I know its history, its weight, its installation, its location. Then a stranger stops in front of it and asks a question I have never phrased in that way. The question reactivates the object.

This is one of the major functions of the external perspective. It restores to the author the strangeness of his own work.

This phenomenon is exactly what we described with the brain outside the skull: an external architecture can restore something from your own system in a form that you no longer consciously maintain.

This is how a foreign gaze works. It becomes a distorting mirror in the best sense of the term: not a mirror that faithfully reproduces your image, but a mirror that accentuates certain features and forces you to look at them.

That is why I have never tried to prevent interpretation. I can challenge it if it is factually incorrect. I can correct a date, a name, a causal link. But I do not have to tell a director how they should feel about the work. Their freedom is precisely what I come to seek when they enter the room.

This attitude is consistent with my entire doctrine of information: one must distinguish between the fact and its interpretation. The fact can be verified. The interpretation is open to debate. The confusion between the two produces propaganda.

A powerful work must accept the plurality of interpretations while protecting the factuality of its story.

The same rule applies to this book: I want it to be well-researched, not hagiographic. This means that the writer's perspective must be able to surprise me, sometimes even contradict me, as long as they do not fabricate the facts. This disposition already existed in my approach to media consumption.

Jean-Luc Chavent, whom I had nicknamed "Mr. Heritage" because of the way he viewed the transmission of the place, introduced yet another perspective: one that begins to consider the Abode of Chaos not only as a contemporary work, but as something whose transmission could one day become a question.

This shift interested me precisely because it came from the outside. A viewer did not alter the cosa mentale; however, they could bring to light a category under which I had not yet fully formulated the work. We will return to this question when the Abode of Chaos itself becomes an object of heritage study.

But the outside perspective does not always offer such depth. There are also the hurried visitors, the cameras looking for a spectacular shot, the people who are determined to find what they decided to see before they even arrived. That, too, is part of the world.

I do not want to artificially create an ideal reception. Every public work is subject to misunderstandings, simplifications, and distortions. The question is whether it can withstand them.

I gradually learned that trying to correct every interpretation would be a form of madness. It would mean spending one's life chasing after thousands of people, telling them: you have not understood. A truly powerful work must allow for some misinterpretation. It must let time do its work.

Some people come back. Others read more. Some will never change their minds. That is okay.

The world is not a jury that the author must convince unanimously.

This acceptance probably made me freer. I could continue to explain the facts, produce documents, open doors, but I did not need to obtain total support.

The sheer number of visitors ultimately created a very particular situation. When millions of people pass through a place, the gaze ceases to be a sociological abstraction. It becomes a mass of reactions, photographs, conversations, and testimonies.

Some visitors arrive hostile and leave intrigued. Others come already convinced. Some do not understand but return. Children see things that adults do not. People with no particular background in contemporary art can immediately feel a connection to the materials or the story.

These differences have always interested me because they reveal the limitations of specialized discourse. Art history possesses indispensable tools for understanding a work of art, but it does not hold a monopoly on the correct perspective.

A child can sometimes perceive a structure before knowing how to name it.

A metalworker can understand a part by its weight.

A former soldier can interpret a sign of war differently than a historian.

A migrant may experience a border or a cage with an intensity that does not belong to aesthetic commentary.

The plurality of experiences gives rise to meaning.

This phenomenon does not threaten the integrity of the work; it proves that it possesses enough depth to encounter different experiences.

Alongside professional perspectives, another body of work has gradually emerged: that of visitors. Their photographs, videos, and comments have multiplied viewpoints, forming a vast cloud of reception around the artwork. This proliferation does not alter the conceptual act; it documents what uncoordinated perspectives spontaneously choose to retain.

The photographs taken by visitors do not automatically become the Abode of Chaos. They constitute the immense cloud of gazes that surrounds it.

This cloud, in turn, constitutes an object of study. Which areas are most photographed? Which faces? Which details? What do visitors spontaneously choose when no mediator tells them where to look?

This mass of images can reveal certain regularities in the way visitors frame, photograph, and visually retain the artwork. Where a critic produces an elaborate but singular interpretation, millions of photographs allow us to observe repeated behaviors.

Photographs allow us to study what is captured, framed, repeated, or shared; they do not provide access to the entirety of the experience. The number describes observable behavior, not everything that was perceived.

The corpus, therefore, also has its blind spot.

This dialogue between singular and collective perspectives ultimately runs throughout the entire chapter. Envoyé spécial constructs an editorial viewpoint. Bocuse offers the perspective of a global neighbor. MBC Korea shifts the reading culturally. Jean-Luc Chavent introduces the heritage perspective. Visitors produce millions of uncoordinated gazes.

None of them is the work itself. Together, they constitute the history of its reception.

And this story is beginning to become a second layer of the Abode of Chaos. An ancient work is always surrounded by centuries of commentary, copies, restorations, and retellings. For a contemporary work, we are witnessing, almost in real time, the construction of this interpretive layer. The internet is accelerating this process considerably.

What once took generations can now happen in a few years. An image is taken up, commented on, reinterpreted, translated. Some narratives become dominant, then are corrected by others. Reception itself becomes a complex system.

This poses a new documentary responsibility: it is necessary to preserve not only the work but also a part of the history of its gaze.

This is why the thousands of reports devoted to the Abode of Chaos are not merely evidence of visibility. They constitute an archive of perception. We can see how the vocabulary changes over the decades. How some questions disappear and others emerge. How the same plan is interpreted differently depending on the era. How a work initially described by its conflict can gradually be viewed from a heritage, architectural, or historical perspective.

This lexical transformation is almost as important as the physical transformation of the place. It measures the shift in social perspective.

One day, we could construct a semantic map of over twenty-five years of reporting and observe which words are rising in popularity, which are falling, and which are changing in meaning. I would see this as a remarkable form of cultural history. For a society reveals much about itself through the words it uses to name what it does not yet understand.

The term "chaos" is a magnificent example. For some, it means disorder. For me, it belongs to a much deeper scientific, alchemical, and figurative history. The same word thus contains both the misunderstanding and its possible correction.

As perspectives become more informed, a word can change in depth without changing its spelling. This is how the world sometimes learns to see.

Slowly. In layers. Through successive encounters. Through resistance too.

I certainly do not want to tell this story as a triumphant march where every journalist gradually became convinced. That would be false and pointless. The world continues to produce contradictory interpretations. And thankfully so.

What changes is the average quality of the questions. When a work survives long enough, superficial questions usually end up coexisting with deeper ones. That in itself is an intellectual victory.

The question is no longer simply: why did you do that?

We begin to ask: how does this work fit into the history of ruins?

What is his relationship to architecture?

How to preserve an organism undergoing transformation?

What is the link between digital archives and physical surfaces?

What is the role of geopolitics?

From that moment on, I knew that the work had gained something rarer: it forced its viewer to expand their vocabulary.

That is what I expect from art: not automatic acceptance, but better questions.

The work should question, not provoke.

The outside perspective is where this doctrine can be tested. If the viewer leaves only shocked, we have not necessarily succeeded. If they leave with a question they did not have before entering, then something has happened.

Perhaps this is why I am so attached to the conversations after the visits. I wanted to know what people had seen. Not to check if they had given the right answer, but to discover what the work had triggered in mental frameworks different from my own.

Some spoke to me of alchemy. Others of war. Others of religion. Others of time, death, networks, ecology, the Art Market, the madness of the contemporary world.

These seemingly scattered readings may all be correct because the Abode of Chaos was constructed precisely as a system of correspondences.

A Total Work of Art does not mean that it speaks of everything indiscriminately. It means that several levels of reality can meet within a common architecture.

The viewer often chooses the entry point that corresponds to their own story. Then, if they stay long enough, they may discover that this entry point connects to others. This is the Zone once again. You enter via a path and gradually understand that the initial map was insufficient.

The role of the outside world is therefore also to test the different doors. Some work better than I had imagined. Others remain difficult.

This knowledge can enrich the transmission without altering the conceptual act.

Here again is the loop that we find everywhere in this book: I produce a form, the world responds, I observe the response, and then this observation sometimes improves my way of transmitting the form.

This is not about giving in to the public. It is about learning from the reception.

An author who refuses to learn from their audience often mistakes integrity for deafness. I never ask the visitor to interpret the work for me. But if they never understand what I believe I have made visible, this difficulty constitutes a given. Perhaps I need to improve a text, a map, a film, or a documentary resource.

The boundary lies here: the transmission can be corrected without the work itself being altered. This explains the progressive proliferation of media surrounding The Abode of Chaos: films, books, pamphlets, websites, tours, plans, studies, videos. These are not attempts to make the work more palatable. They are interfaces between a very dense body of material and viewers who do not all arrive with the same amount of time or the same background.

The world that comes to watch therefore forces the work to develop interfaces.

Finally, there is an even stranger, reverse movement.

The image that had entered the Abode of Chaos from the flow of the world may one day leave again. I had already observed this with the de-captioned portraits: some major international press outlets, tired of the same photographs provided by the major agencies, asked us for permission to reproduce a digitally painted portrait and then transposed onto our walls.

This is where my work as a digital meta-portraitist takes on another dimension. For me, a portrait is not an autonomous image fixed once and for all. I select and digitally recode a face, inscribe it within an architecture of relationships, and then allow it to enter the temporality of the Abode of Chaos. Its meaning can then shift with History, with the other figures surrounding it, and with the events that reorganize the graph to which it belongs.

The visible portrait remains the point of entry. But the true work also takes place in this invisible network of correspondences and in the transformations of meaning that time imposes on it.

Then an almost perfect loop occurred. A photograph was born in the world, the agency captioned it, the Abode of Chaos seized it, transformed it and deprived it of its caption; then, years later, the press came and took up this portrait and added a new caption to it.

The image had left the flow, crossed the painting, waited in the Abode of Chaos, then rejoined the flow charged with another temporality.

This return does not contradict the principle of No Legend. It fulfills it.

Because between the two legends, the image experienced a moment of sovereignty.

It existed without any necessary explanation. And when it reappears in the newspaper, it is no longer quite the image the newspaper once projected to the world. In the meantime, it has crossed into the Abode of Chaos.