Glossary

Bringing a form, score, or device into action through reading, voice, looking, handling, movement, or a way of waiting. Activation lets you experience a form’s possibilities and can change how you use it. Its effects contribute to form development and research questions.

The displacement, tilting, or disruption of a reference axis. An axis shift changes how a situation is perceived or traversed and rearranges the available reference points.

A place or moment where a path branches and other directions become possible. It may result from a choice, an encounter, or a constraint. It changes the path’s course, sometimes before you can perceive its consequences.

In L’Élanographe’s internal notations, speech heard during conversations and its reformulations appear in the first person. Across listening situations, these voices follow one another and intermingle on the page without being attributed to individual speakers. The pronoun ‘I’ shifts position, occupied in turn by different voices. The ‘choral I’ allows desires, injunctions, objections, and sometimes contradictory orientations to coexist on the page.

A provisional arrangement of words, signs, objects, documents, or voices in which distances and proximities bring relations into view. A constellation can be explored from several angles and rearranged using its existing elements.

A condition, limit, rule, or force that restricts and shapes the possibilities of movement. It can frame, slow, compress, divert, or prevent an action. Encountering a constraint may prompt adjustment, resistance, or bifurcation; it may also leave a situation blocked. L’Élanographe explores how constraints operate and how their effects might shift.

The process through which something—an object, relation, score, spatial arrangement, or way of perceiving—takes shape through choices, gestures, experiments, and encounters with a material or situation. Creation helps to articulate what is being sought.

An approach in which artistic practice constitutes a mode of inquiry: the forms produced help to formulate questions, test hypotheses, observe effects, and revise methods. In L’Élanographe, creation-research notably involves transforming traces of situated speech into derived forms, turning them into scores and activating them. The research then compares the effects of changing a form’s medium, scale, or temporality, or who or what it addresses: what becomes perceptible, what shifts, and what calls for reconsideration.

An arrangement of positional words—here, there, elsewhere, in front, behind, inside, outside—with lines, blank spaces, and intervals. These words acquire meaning in relation to the person, place, and moment of their encounter. Their arrangement creates a field in which thought can take place, unfold spatially, and establish relations between its elements, forming a provisional geography.

An operation that produces a new form by changing a trace’s medium, scale, rhythm, or function, or who or what it addresses. Derivation preserves some of the relations within the source form while transforming the conditions in which it can be read and activated.

What a path moves towards while its shape and destination remain partly unknown. The horizon gives movement something to reach towards without becoming a fixed objective. It can shift, become clearer, disappear, or take a different form through experience.

A movement that departs from an expected course to explore other relations, forms, or points of view. A detour lengthens or redirects a path and can reveal elements that a direct route would have left out of view.

A local indication of possible movement from a given position. A direction offers a provisional answer to the question ‘which way?’ It is one component of orientation, within which several directions, sometimes incompatible, can act at the same time.

The tension between the reference points that help us locate ourselves and the movements that render those reference points uncertain. The parentheses connect orientation and disorientation: disrupting a reference point can reveal what shapes an orientation and open up an exploration.

The beginning or intensification of a movement towards what attracts, matters, or calls for something to follow, sometimes before an aim has been articulated. Élan may emerge as curiosity, a gesture, hesitation, refusal, a detour or an attempt. It changes through encounters with constraints, materials, and relations.

A neologism bringing together the French words élan and graphie. L’Élanographe names a space for creation-research, a method of inquiry, and a set of instruments that make perceptible the forces that guide, hold back, or redirect a path. Its work explores the traces, relations, and material conditions through which an orientation takes shape.

A graphic and manipulable instrument that explores the forces shaping an orientation from a movable centre and through multiple directions. Its reference points offer different ways to locate tensions, bring questions together, and try out directions. The compass makes navigational choices perceptible and open to discussion.

Forms, objects, scores, and devices for exploring a situation through concrete actions: moving, tracing, folding, passing on, layering, suspending, going around, or rebounding. These instruments make certain relations perceptible and allow people to experience how those relations change through manipulation.

Giving graphic, material, spatial, or sonic form to the forces that set a movement in motion, hold it back, divert it, or suspend it, as well as to the rebounds that alter its course. Elanography makes certain passages perceptible through partial traces.

The moment when someone begins to participate in a device through contact with its materials, rules, and possibilities for action. Their attention and gestures shape how the situation unfolds.

A practice of inquiry and movement towards what remains to be known, articulated or determined. Exploration begins with the concrete conditions of a situation and develops through encounters along the way: words, lines, objects, gestures, resistance, people, silences or bifurcations. It proceeds through experiments, detours, comparisons, returns and transformations. It tests the conditions that allow a passage and observes how both the situation and the movement change through navigation.

A space in which what is experienced takes a perceptible form—sound, word, graphy, gesture or arrangement—and changes through contact with that form. A stretched onomatopoeia, a compressed sign, or a fragmented sentence gives presence to an experience while retaining some opacity. In L’Élanographe, extimate space takes shape between the body, the inscription, and what their encounter lets us perceive, transform, or move.

A neologism combining the French verbs faire—to make or do—and advenir—to come into being. It means acting on the material, relational, and temporal conditions that allow something to take shape. Questioning, arranging, spacing, moving, or leaving something in suspension all contribute to this work. In L’Élanographe, faire-advenir involves attending to what emerges, the gestures it prompts, and an outcome still taking shape. It is the work of creating and adjusting the conditions in which something may emerge.

Forms that make the tensions, resistance, and transformations encountered during navigation perceptible. They give actions such as crossing, going around, dividing, returning, suspending, or rebounding a tangible form you can manipulate.

The way a gesture gives form to an inscription on a surface or medium. Pressure, speed, thickness, scale, spacing, and arrangement all contribute to what the inscription makes perceptible. In L’Élanographe, graphy explores passages between speech, sign, and drawing: it can carry rhythm, hesitation, or impulse and initiate a direction before it has been articulated.

A neologism that brings together horizon, desire, and geodesy. It describes an operation in which the desire for a horizon gives movement something to reach toward and brings the distances of a path into play—moving closer, moving away, going around, or returning—while the path itself is still taking shape.

Graphic notations made from within a listening situation. They give material form to the operations through which speech is selected, condensed, connected, enlarged, framed, spatialised or left in suspension. The term ‘internal’ refers both to their involvement in the unfolding of the situation and to their original purpose within a confidential context. Derivation allows forms to be developed from them for other contexts of reading and activation.

Intuition. A perception or connection that emerges before it can be fully articulated. It becomes a felt hypothesis to be tested through experience, comparison, or the making of a form.

A form in motion that connects, separates, crosses, goes around, returns, or seeks a way through. In L’Élanographe, a line is at once a graphic trace, a way of moving through a situation, and an indication of the forces shaping an orientation. Its direction, rhythm, thickness, interruptions, and changes of medium reveal how a path takes shape.

In L’Élanographe, a graphic sign that gives condensed form to a movement, tension, relation or quality of language. It can be read, moved, voiced, or manipulated. Its function develops and changes through the relations in which it is placed.

An organised set of logograms forming a visual vocabulary. Its signs can be arranged, brought together, layered, and set in motion to produce relations, sequences, or trajectories. Their meanings change through arrangement and use, without necessarily forming a language with fixed equivalents.

A practice of questioning, listening, and reformulating that helps to develop what is seeking expression. In L’Élanographe, it extends into graphic, material, and spatial actions: isolating a word, moving a sign, or varying scale or rhythm can prompt further questioning. What is articulated develops through exchanges between speech, gestures, and forms, including their silences and resistance.

Putting orientation into practice by moving through a situation with its reference points, relations, constraints, and possibilities. Navigation develops along the path and through the effects of each movement. Continuing, branching off, returning, pausing, or leaving are all ways of navigating.

A way of speaking or writing through images, detours, shifts, fragments, and associations. It seeks to unsettle familiar ways of reading and keep several relations between elements possible.

A word or expression that evokes a sound through its own sonority. L’Élanographe works with onomatopoeia as vocal and graphic material that can be repeated, stretched, compressed, fragmented, or arranged in space. Sound, rhythm and inscription interact until the onomatopoeia becomes a form to look at, voice or activate.

A material and relational process through which a person or group locates themselves and composes a possible movement among existing lines, constraints, objects, media and other voices. Orientation develops from a position and can include simultaneous or contradictory directions. Here, orienting oneself means participating in this process by acting on the relations between position, reference points, constraints, and possible directions.

A set of propositions, instructions, or signs inviting someone to explore how they locate themselves and continue along a path: following two incompatible directions, moving a reference point, or leaving a response open. Activating the score makes it possible to observe how an orientation takes shape and changes.

A situation in which meeting one demand means violating another, while opportunities to question or leave the arrangement are limited. When asked to take initiative but every departure from instructions is penali​sed, it can make action impossible. L’Élanographe explores how such demands become embedded in speech and relations, and how giving them graphic, spatial or gestural form allows them to be examined.

A transformation that occurs when a line, utterance, gesture, or form crosses a threshold, changes medium, or enters a new relation. A passage connects different configurations and transforms what moves through it by folding, fragmenting, displacing, or changing its function.

Objects whose form, material, or use allows someone to alter a relation or divert an expected movement through handling. They provide material mediations for crossing, passing on, moving, suspending, or rebounding within an experience.

The gradual opening of a passage where no established path yet exists. Path-making develops through repeated movement or negotiation with resistance. It retains traces of the conditions that formed the passage.

Play. An exploratory situation in which rules, forms and possible actions create room for manoeuvre. Play allows us to change, unexpected relations to emerge, and the effects of a choice, refusal, or diversion to be observed. Constraints become explicit and available for manipulation and transformation.

Here, poiesis names the work through which something takes shape by means of gestures, materials and relations. Poietics attends to this work: its conditions, experiments, choices, resistance and transformations. L’Élanographe explores how passages between speech, graphic marks, objects and activation transform what is taking shape.

The relative place occupied by a person, voice, line, word or object within a configuration. A change of position alters the relations, distances and directions that can be perceived.

Rebound. An inflection that occurs when a movement encounters resistance, an interruption, a limit or another movement. The rebound alters its direction, rhythm, intensity, or form and opens a way of continuing that carries the trace of the encounter.

An arrangement of forms, objects, instructions, positions, durations, and possible actions that creates a situation in which someone can address, attend to, or respond to something or someone. It distributes positions, enables some gestures, and constrains others.

A movement towards something already encountered. The path travelled changes the position from which it is approached again. Returning can open another way to read it or continue from it.

A form of writing that sets out gestures, durations, relations, choices and possibilities for variation, ready to be activated.

A moment when the way a configuration works changes: a relation is reversed, a threshold becomes perceptible, or another passage becomes possible. During activation, a shift may occur when a gesture changes how a form is read or how someone participates in the situation.

The practice of composing a path from a particular position, with the reference points, relations, and constraints of a situation. It engages the body through posture, range of movement, rhythm, and ways of looking, tracing, or handling. A gesture can initiate a direction before that direction is explicitly chosen. Its effects then become reference points for continuing, branching off, returning, or pausing.

An arrangement of materials, positions, durations, and possible actions that makes room for gestures, relations, or expressions to take shape. Its configuration can evolve as something emerges. It also accommodates waiting, interruption, and what remains in suspension. Faire-advenir names the work carried out on the conditions of such a space.

A temporary environment in which graphic marks, objects, projections, voices, silences, bodies, rules and spatial positions bring a tension into play. A theatre of thought creates the conditions for navigation. It becomes active as its elements are read, traversed, moved, refused, or brought into new relations.

A zone of passage where the conditions of orientation, reading, or action change. A fold, edge, interruption, change of scale, or shift of medium can act as a threshold, altering what becomes visible, possible, or sayable.

Trace. A partial form left by the passage of speech, a gesture, a force, or a relation. A trace makes some aspects of what happened perceptible and can become the starting point for further transformations.

A field still to be experienced, shaped, or understood. It is approached through existing knowledge, expectations, and constraints, and sets exploration in motion.

Something beginning to emerge before it has found a stable form: a sentence fragment, a sensed relation, a hesitant gesture, an image, or a possible direction. Creation can give it a provisional form while leaving what follows open.