The world would no longer just come to look at the Abode of Chaos. It would begin to transmit it itself.

For a long time, access to the world came through identifiable doors: museums, critics, newspapers, television channels, publishers, cultural institutions.

Their role was not necessarily bad; it was structuring. They selected, prioritized, contextualized, and validated.

But they were also intermediaries.

And the history of networks had long taught me that an intermediary, as soon as a technology allows one to bypass them, ceases to be inevitable. I was aware of this revolution even before it fully affected the art world, because my entire professional life had been built amidst phenomena of disintermediation.

The network does not necessarily eliminate intermediaries; it reconfigures their power. Some disappear, others become stronger, new ones appear. Above all, it opens direct paths between those who send and those who want to receive.

This may seem commonplace today. It was not when we started building our own infrastructure.

The principle, however, remains the same: If A can reach C without necessarily going through B, the entire equilibrium of the system changes.

Culture was obviously not going to escape this transformation. For decades, an artist could produce a considerable body of work and remain almost invisible if he did not enter into some networks of legitimation: a gallery, an institution, a critic, an exhibition, a catalogue.

Recognition circulated through doors.

The internet has not eliminated these doors, but it has opened thousands of windows.

Then social media did even more: it transformed every potential viewer into a broadcaster. A phone became a camera, a control room, an editing table, a studio, and a distribution channel.

The gaze is no longer confined to a downward direction. It spreads rhizomatically.

This technical concentration is staggering when you remember the weeks of work, the heavy equipment, the rails and the Betacam required for 999.

What once required a team can now fit in a pocket.

This does not mean that the quality is automatically the same.

This means that the right to broadcast is no longer technically rare.

And this shift seems to me much more important than the question of whether or not one likes social media.

We may hate their codes, their accelerations, their attentional violence, their sometimes simplistic economy; nevertheless, they have irreversibly altered the topology of transmission.

When Tibo InShape enters this story, it is therefore not for me the arrival of a simple influencer in an artistic place.

The term itself could become a trap, because it would immediately reduce the phenomenon to a contemporary social category.

What interests me is the structure.

A person has a huge community, their own language, an autonomous production capacity, and direct access to an audience that traditional cultural institutions often struggle to reach, especially among younger generations.

That person arrives without needing an editor-in-chief to explain the angle. It does not need a broadcaster to reserve a time slot. It does not need a critic to decide beforehand that The Abode of Chaos deserves their attention.

He comes, watches, films, interprets, edits and transmits.

The entire vertical chain has been compressed into one individual and his team.

That is what's historically interesting.

This shift obviously carries risks. Traditional mediation also produced contradiction, verification, and editorial time.

When filters decrease, speed increases, and so does individual responsibility. Someone can reach millions of people with a false, inaccurate, or sensationalist interpretation.

Therefore, I am not naive about this disintermediation.

I know that a direct channel does not guarantee any truth. But an institutional channel does not guarantee it any more. It only shifts the location where error can occur.

My method remains the same: to distinguish between infrastructure and content.

The network offers a possibility. What each person does with it is another question.

What interested me about these new mediators is precisely their ability to arrive with codes that are not those of the contemporary art world.

This may shock some habits: a more direct language, faster editing, a way of addressing the viewer that does not rely on scholarly commentary, a physical energy.

But why should a work be condemned to be properly transmitted only in the language of those who already know how to read it?

If the Abode of Chaos is truly a Total Work of Art, if it speaks of war, bodies, power, technology, death, chaos, networks, religion, matter and memory, then it must also be able to reach someone who has never opened an exhibition catalogue.

This does not mean simplifying the work to the point of impoverishment. It means accepting multiple points of entry.

The mistake would be to believe that depth lies in the vocabulary used to describe it.

A child can be deeply moved by something that an art historian will later analyze with great sophistication. The two experiences do not cancel each other out. Knowledge can deepen perception; it does not have a monopoly on intensity.

Perhaps this is one of the things that has always separated me from a certain worldly conception of art: I do not believe that a work gains in value because it becomes inaccessible to those who do not possess the social codes to talk about it.

On the contrary, I believe that a great work must be able to withstand several levels of interpretation. It can offer an immediate entry point and yet retain an extremely complex structure.

The Abode of Chaos works precisely like this.

We can first receive the mass, the skulls, the portraits, the steel, the ruins, the signs.

Then gradually discover alchemy, art history, geopolitics, mathematics, networks, philosophy.

The first glance is not necessarily inferior to the next.

It is the threshold.

Social media has massively reintroduced the question of the threshold. A few seconds are sometimes enough to decide whether someone will continue watching or move on to something else. This may seem incompatible with a work that requires time.

In reality, the problem is more interesting:

How to use speed to drive towards depth?

It is a question of mediation, not a condemnation of the medium.

A title can be brief and lead to a book. A photograph can open up an investigation spanning several years. A video excerpt can make people want to physically visit a place.

The mistake is to judge the fragment as if it claimed to be the whole.

New media often operate in fragments. It is therefore necessary to build pathways allowing the fragment to rejoin the whole.

This is precisely why the documentary solidity of The Abode of Chaos becomes even more important as the images circulate.

The more a short sequence is viewed out of context, the easier it should be for someone who wants to delve deeper to find the source, the story, the works, the data.

The network accelerates the surface; the archive must preserve the depth.

Here again, Artprice and the Abode of Chaos are in dialogue. A price in isolation is almost meaningless without context. An isolated image of a Total Work of Art can also be misleading.

The solution is not to prohibit isolation — it is inherent to the network — but to build behind it an infrastructure of contextualization.

That is why I have always wanted images to be able to circulate widely while maintaining solid foundations.

I saw very early on the conflict that the cultural world would encounter with the Internet: some would try to protect the value by artificially restricting access, while the digital logic was pushing in exactly the opposite direction.

I have never confused free access to an image with the lack of value of the work.

On the contrary.

An image can circulate everywhere and make the original even more desirable because it makes you want to encounter its scale, its material, its real presence.

Reproductions of the Mona Lisa have not eliminated the queue at the Louvre.

The problem with art is not necessarily that it is seen too much; it is sometimes that it is only seen through mediations that are too poor.

Social media thus simultaneously increases visibility and the risk of reduction. This contradiction interests me far more than simplistic moral judgments about "good" and "bad" media.

A very popular video may contain an extremely accurate insight. An academic text may be mediocre. And vice versa.

The medium does not guarantee intelligence.

It simply imposes different constraints.

This is where the encounter between Tibo InShape and the Abode of Chaos takes on a particular dimension. His audience does not necessarily arrive with the vocabulary of art history, but they know the body, effort, transformation, surpassing, risk, discipline.

But the Abode of Chaos contains a huge number of bodies.

We sometimes forget this point when we only look at it through its images. It is made of displaced masses, welds, injuries, nights of work, heat, steel, fatigue.

We devoted the entirety of Part IX to this reality.

A mediator coming from a universe deeply connected to the body can therefore immediately see things that a strictly theoretical view might consider secondary.

This is yet another example of the richness of different mental architectures.

Everyone arrives with their own sensors.

The visitor's body makes as much of a selection as their intelligence.

What interests me, therefore, is not whether a content creator fits the traditional profile of someone the cultural world considers legitimate to comment on a work. It is precisely this monopoly on legitimacy that is disappearing.

The correct question is:

Is he really looking?

Is he looking beyond the immediate effect?

Does he convey something real and make his audience want to ask a question?

If so, a transmission exists.

This shift reminds me of the arrival of the internet in the information professions. Established professionals often responded: "But these new players do not know the codes." Exactly. The network does not always ask permission for the codes. It directly tests the user's usefulness.

This can be brutal, sometimes unfair, often chaotic. But it forces established systems to justify the true value of their intermediation.

Why a critic?

Why a journalist?

Why a police commissioner?

If the answer is simply "because he has the authority to speak," the network weakens him. If the answer is "because he provides knowledge, verification, and context that cannot be found elsewhere," then his function remains.

Therefore, I do not believe in the disappearance of mediators. I believe in putting them to the test.

The best become more valuable precisely because raw information is so abundant. This is the paradox of the internet: the more everyone can talk, the more important those who truly know how to distinguish, verify, and contextualize can become. But they no longer have the exclusive right to open the door.

That is what changes everything.

The Abode of Chaos is perfectly suited to this new architecture because it has always been a place of disintermediation.

It never waited for an outdoor exhibition to reach its audience. The public came to it. Booklets circulated. DVDs circulated. Photographs circulated. The site itself became a media outlet.

Social networks did not create this logic; they amplified it.

I recognized this shift: I had spent decades observing networks taking away certain players' distribution monopolies. The same phenomenon was happening in culture.

What struck me most was the speed scale.

A major television network could reach millions of people, but according to a demanding schedule: production, editing, programming, broadcasting. The network can cause an explosion in a matter of hours.

This acceleration transforms the relationship between event and archive.

When millions of people simultaneously discover an image, the documentation system must be ready immediately. Otherwise, the first available interpretation can become dominant simply by virtue of its temporal advantage.

The first narrative occupies the space.

We have seen it in geopolitics. We see it in crises. We see it in the reputation of individuals. The time required for contextualization therefore becomes strategic. A public work must be able to respond quickly to immediate questions.

What is this?

Since when?

For what?

Who is the author?

What sources exist?

How to visit?

The academic world can take several years to produce a high-quality study; the network, on the other hand, requires an entry point in seconds. Both timeframes are necessary.

Never sacrifice depth to urgency, but do not abandon urgency to those who will speak for you. This is also a lesson learned from twenty-three years of conflict surrounding the Abode of Chaos.

Once a legal and media narrative takes hold, it can become incredibly difficult to correct. The internet can amplify this injustice, but it can also offer a counter-space where primary documents become accessible. That is why I have never considered communication as a veneer added after the work.

A work's ability to document its own status is essential to its survival.

This is not propaganda. On the contrary: providing the pieces, the images, the timelines allows the viewer to form their own opinion. I always prefer this to an authoritative statement saying, "Believe me."

The network, when it functions well, can become a vast documentary contradiction.

Someone offers an interpretation. Another finds the source. An old image reappears. A video shows another scene.

Truth does not automatically emerge from this cacophony, but narrative monopolies become more difficult to maintain.

This is very closely related to my concept of the Blind Spot.

Each mediator has their own perspective. Multiplying mediators does not eliminate all biases, but sometimes allows the perspective of one to reveal that of another.

A journalist sees what an influencer does not.

A historian sees what a journalist does not see.

A visitor sees what the historian does not see.

The network allows all these readings to coexist.

The danger begins when the algorithm locks them into communities that no longer meet.

Disintermediation can then produce an extremely violent re-segmentation. We think we have eliminated the gatekeepers; we discover that another gatekeeper, algorithmic, invisibly decides what enters our field.

A platform is not a neutral space.

It has rules, interests, an architecture of attention. It favors certain formats, certain durations, certain behaviors. Those who wish to transmit must understand this structure without becoming entirely its product. It is almost an artistic problem:

How can we use the grammar of a medium without letting that medium dictate the content?

Cinema had already taught us this. Television too. The internet simply makes this tension more visible because its metrics are immediate.

Views, reactions, comments, shares: everything becomes quantifiable.

This quantification can be both exhilarating and dangerous. It gives the impression that the value of the content is directly measured by the audience.

I know better than most how useful a number can be and how absurd it can become if taken out of context. A video viewed one hundred million times does not automatically become one hundred times more relevant than a video viewed one million times.

Audience measurement measures circulation, not necessarily quality.

But it does measure something real: the number of times a piece of content has had the opportunity to enter a perceptual field. Therefore, we must interpret these figures as we interpret Art Market data: never ask them to answer a question for which they were not designed.

It is this discipline that allows me to observe new forms of media without either despising or worshipping them. When certain videos related to the Abode of Chaos generate huge audiences, I do not say: that proves the quality of my work. That would be intellectually ridiculous.

I say: this proves that an image or story from this work, at that moment, possesses an exceptional capacity for circulation. Then the real question begins:

For what ?

What was seen?

What audience?

Which fragment?

What were the reactions?

What is the return rate?

How long?

The network then provides a laboratory for almost instantaneous reception.

En vadrouille provided me with a particularly striking example of this new situation. A sequence related to the Abode of Chaos was able to reach tens of millions of viewers and change scale almost instantly. I obviously do not consider this audience reach as an aesthetic achievement. It primarily measures a capacity for circulation.

What changes even more is how the encounter occurs. In a museum, the visitor has already chosen to come. In a digital stream, the artwork can appear before someone who has not sought it out, amidst unrelated content. The algorithm thus becomes one of the mechanisms that organize the very possibility of this encounter.

This forces us to distinguish between impression and transmission. An image may hold our gaze for a few seconds; this does not yet mean that the work has been understood, or even identified. The real question begins after the viewing:

What was being watched?

How many understood that this was a Total Work of Art and not an extravagant decoration?

How many searched afterwards?

How many wanted to rediscover the history, the works, and the documents?

This is where the fragment must be able to rejoin the corpus. Video can attract attention; the archive allows for deeper exploration. The network creates the threshold, but transmission requires continuity.

Here again, a difference emerges with traditional media. A television program provides a global audience. Platforms produce much more detailed traces of behavior.

This obviously raises considerable questions about personal data and the attention economy, but from the perspective of cultural reception, it is a major shift. We can almost observe in real time how content circulates.

Does an image generate commentary on art, politics, location, or strangeness? What detail is repeated? What shot becomes a screenshot? At what point do people stop the video?

All these metrics describe the behavior of the gaze. They should never become the master of creation.

If the artist starts modifying the work to maximize retention rates, they gradually cease to be an author and become a provider of optimized content. I obviously did not want that.

The cosa mentale cannot be negotiated with an algorithm.

But transmission itself can teach.

This distinction is exactly the one we have already established with the companions: intention remains paramount, implementation is guided by reality. If a format helps a new generation enter the Abode of Chaos, I can accept it without transforming the Abode of Chaos to accommodate that format.

It is a ridge line.

It requires humility and firmness simultaneously.

Humility to recognize that someone in their twenties does not necessarily approach a work with the same references as me.

Firmness so as not to transform the work into a product intended to satisfy what I suppose to be his tastes.

I always prefer to give the other person more than they think they are coming for.

One might arrive expecting the spectacular and leave with a question about the story. Arrive expecting visual chaos and discover a geometric order. Arrive expecting a strange video and stumble upon more than twenty-five years of research.

This is what successful mediation can do: use the threshold without reducing the structure to the threshold.

Tibo InShape thus becomes less the account of a visit than the sign of a regime change: the visitor can now be simultaneously viewer, producer, and distribution channel. He no longer arrives alone; his community virtually accompanies his gaze.

This is a historically unprecedented situation. The visitor simultaneously becomes a conduit. This fusion transforms the relationship to the place. The camera is no longer the exceptional equipment of a television crew. It almost naturally accompanies the visit. The act of watching and that of recording become so close as to sometimes merge.

We now live in a society where a huge number of people also watch content through their phones. We may regret this filter, but it would be superficial to see it as merely a distraction.

The phone also becomes an immediate external memory, a way to take a fragment to rework it, show it, find it again.

We find the brain outside the skull again.

A generation builds its visual memory with devices that the previous one did not possess. We must understand this shift before judging it.

This even changes the way we are present in a place.

A visitor films a work of art, films himself in front of it, and speaks simultaneously to those who will see the sequence later. He is physically here and socially already elsewhere.

The Abode of Chaos, which had long worked precisely on the superimposition of the local and the global, becomes a natural ground for this experiment.

Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d’Or can enter millions of screens in a few seconds without anyone having organized a satellite or pressed a single DVD.

I am measuring the progress made since 999. We had to physically create millions of supports to give the Zone a mobile body.

Now, the mobile body is the network itself.

The medium is no longer shipped; it is addressed. This change might seem purely technical. It profoundly alters the temporality of the work.

A DVD arrives after it has been manufactured. A network can transmit during the event.

The distance between experience and dissemination tends towards zero. This also transforms the possibility of controlling, verifying, and correcting.

A mistake can be global before you have time to see it. But beauty can be beautiful too.

An unexpected moment can find an audience that no media shot could have imagined. The network increases uncertainty.

And here I find something I have always loved: an open system produces properties and relationships that none of its actors had necessarily foreseen.

No one can predict exactly what will go viral. We can optimize it, but not guarantee it. Randomness re-enters an extremely calculated architecture.

It is almost a contemporary form of Chaos.

Millions of individual micro-decisions — watching, stopping, sharing, commenting — suddenly produce a macroscopic wave. No individual decided it.

The phenomenon belongs to the network.

This logic is profoundly fractal and it aligns with all my thinking on social networks. This is also why the term "influencer" sometimes seems to me too focused on the individual.

Of course, some people possess immense broadcasting power. But this power only exists within an ecosystem: platform, algorithm, community, cultural codes, temporality.

Influence is a network phenomenon.

An individual becomes a highly centralized point of influence. This explains why older institutions can be destabilized: they were accustomed to controlling certain centers. The network creates new centers almost anywhere.

A young man with a camera can acquire greater mediating power than a publication established for a century. This proves nothing about the comparative value of their content. It proves that the distribution infrastructure has changed.

Those who confuse distribution with legitimacy may then experience an existential crisis. I prefer to separate the issues.

Who can broadcast?

Now, almost everyone.

Who deserves to be believed?

This must continue to be earned through quality, proof, and consistency.

Who can produce a genuine emotion?

No institution holds a monopoly on this. This transformation paves the way for another: artificial intelligence will, in turn, modify certain functions of knowledge access and synthesis. I draw only one lesson from this: eliminating an intermediary never eliminates the need for methodology; it simply shifts the focus of that methodology.

The more people can speak, the more important the source becomes. The more people can produce images, the more important the provenance becomes. Tomorrow, the more people can generate texts and images, the more vital the distinction between primary document and fabrication will become.

So we were already learning something.

Free transmission does not mean the disappearance of criteria. It requires us to reconstruct them differently. This question leads me directly to copyright law. The internet facilitates circulation, but the technical possibility of reproducing a work does not eliminate its author, its origin, or its integrity. Two requirements must be reconciled: allowing images to circulate and preserving the ability to know who produced what, when, in what context, and in what form.

I have never considered these two requirements to be contradictory. One can broadly promote dissemination while remaining rigorous regarding the attribution, modification, commercialization, or misleading presentation of a work. The more signs circulate, the more their original address becomes necessary.

This is particularly true for digital art. Reproducibility is inherent to the medium: an image, a file, or a work can circulate without its content being altered. But this ease of reproduction does not make provenance secondary; it makes it more difficult to maintain and therefore more necessary.

Who created it?

When?

Which version?

From what source?

How did the work reach us?

Digital art is not immune to these questions. It simply makes them more complex.

This requirement of provenance also allows me to look at new mediators without asking them to adopt the codes of the traditional cultural world.

Let them name it.

That they do not transform artificially.

They should, if possible, leave a path to the source.

The rest belongs to their language.

That is where freedom begins.

I am deeply committed to this freedom because I myself have experienced what it means when an authority tries for years to impose a single classification of your work. It would be absurd if, after having defended the possibility of my own perspective for twenty-three years, I were to abandon it.

I can respond, contradict, and provide documentation.

Not abolish.

The freedom of the viewer is the logical consequence of the freedom of the author. The two meet in the work. This conviction is also political in the broadest sense.

A living culture cannot depend solely on institutions that already have the means to decide. It must be able to allow the emergence of forms, perspectives, and voices that were not foreseen by the existing system.

This is exactly what networks make possible when they function properly.

An unknown person can produce an extraordinary vision. An audience can appear where no one expected it. A local work can become global without immediately going through all the stages of the traditional hierarchy.

This possibility is unsettling because it redistributes symbolic capital. But I believe it is profoundly fruitful. Avant-gardes have often had to create their own media precisely because the dominant structures did not receive them: manifestos, journals, posters, leaflets, performances.

The internet is ultimately just a gigantic extension of this historical capacity of the artist to create his own channel.

What changes is the scale.

A leaflet reached a few thousand people. A video can reach tens of millions. Responsibility therefore also changes scale.

The greater the power of transmission, the more important the ethics of the transmitter become. This is something I never want to lose sight of in the enthusiastic rhetoric of freedom. A huge audience can do good or harm with equal effectiveness.

In my view, the network has no morality of its own: it amplifies.

It is up to us to build the code of ethics.

This sentence could be applied almost word for word to artificial intelligence. And here again I see the continuity of the book. Every technology augments human power and then forces us to answer for what we will do with it.

The network increases distribution.

The drone enhances the view.

AI enhances certain cognitive abilities.

Each time, we must distinguish between ability and wisdom. That is why this chapter cannot end with a naive celebration of the new generation against the old. That would be precisely reproducing the pattern I am fighting against.

Traditional media have produced extraordinary things about the Abode of Chaos. Journalists have spent time investigating and constructing complex narratives. The new media outlets are producing something else entirely.

I have no reason to want one to kill the other. I prefer a plurality of perspectives. The more diverse the viewpoints, the greater the chance the work has to be seen in its complexity.

The question is not who has the legitimate power to speak. It becomes: What does each person see?

And what does his perspective bring?

It is this openness that allows The Abode of Chaos to become truly global without becoming a standardized product. It can be watched by a public service journalist, a Korean filmmaker, a heritage specialist, a content creator followed by millions of young people, or a child with their phone.

The same place. Radically different perceptual systems.

And yet the cosa mentale remains intact, because none of these perspectives enters into the creative act itself.

They make up the reception constellation.

This constellation can become immense. It can be magnificent at times, unjust at times, superficial at times, extraordinarily insightful at times. It resembles the world. That is what I accept.

I do not want a clean reception.

I want a lively reception.

And a lively reception inevitably produces Chaos. Here again, we must look for the underlying structure. Certain images will circulate more widely. Certain generations will discover the place through a channel I would never have imagined. The work thus acquires successive media lives.

999 was a lifetime.

Television was another one.

Social media is opening up a new one.

Tomorrow, immersive environments and artificial intelligence will open up even more possibilities.

In my view, fidelity to a work will never consist of demanding that it be transmitted eternally by the same means. That would be to confuse grammar with the medium.

What must remain is the integrity of the act, its origin, its memory, the possibility of returning to the primary corpus. The rest can mutate.

Only mutants survive.

This phrase takes on a very concrete meaning here. A work that rejects new modes of transmission in the name of its purity could end up perfectly pure and perfectly invisible.

I prefer the test of the world.

I prefer that the Abode of Chaos enters screens where I do not fully control what surrounds it, provided that enough memory continues to be produced so that whoever wants to know can find the original.

This is exactly the relationship I have with any technological change: to get involved early enough to understand what it transforms, without abandoning the principle that must remain invariant.

With social media, this principle is simple:

Transmit without losing the source.

And that is probably what these new generations have confirmed for me. They do not ask for permission to watch, film, speak, or broadcast. Very well.

The history of art has never advanced solely by permission. But this new freedom imposes a symmetrical requirement on us: to learn to distinguish circulation from oblivion, resumption from erasure, visibility from knowledge.

An image can travel the world in seconds. But it still needs to retain its return address somewhere. This is where the Abode of Chaos, with its decades of archives, has a considerable advantage: behind the fragment lies the corpus.

Behind the short video lies a story. Behind the spectacular image lie thousands of documents, books, plans, data, testimonies, and works of art.

The network can therefore become not the enemy of depth, but its first gateway. Provided that whoever wishes to can cross the threshold.

One limitation remains, however: even freed from the old broadcasting chains, the camera is still attached to the position of the body that carries it.

What happens when the eye can leave this height, fly over the place and construct trajectories impossible for a visitor?