These pithy petric postings are ‘text messages’ displayed in The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin, an outsider art environment in Long Beach, California. Petriverse is Jardin’s neologism meaning both a world composed of rocks and words composed of rocks. The Petriverse’s tagline “a rock garden where nothing is written in stone” is thus figurative (displays constantly change) and literal (displays include words made with pebbles).

The banner presents the texts as a patchwork stone stack emblematic of the garden’s whimsical aesthetic. Its teetering instability expresses both the deliberate destabilizing of language that Jardin practices and the ongoing/incomplete nature of the Petriverse project.

The messages represent a sampling of Jardin’s experiments in petric poetics, which play on rocks as media, while expressing different dimensions of the artist’s philosophical and affective investments in stone. The range of rhetorical registers reflects the diverse audience the texts are addressing, including school children, teens, hipsters, and artists.