The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin: by Paul A. Harris Main Menu Paul A. Harris

PetriVersa Poetics

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Using pebbles to create a font enabled the outdoor petriverse lattices outdoors to migrate to the computer screen. Occasioned by hours spent tracing stone striatiations and the lined lineages of pebbles, this composition articulates a “dialectical animism” (Bachelard) between thought and stone, and rocks and language, and indicates the slow time this work entails. 

The PetriVersa typeface designed by Zoe Zafman serves as a font of words and concepts. Drawing on concrete poetry’s break with conventional lines, it treats words as conglomerates to be broken down and fractured. 

“Ideas decompose into stones of unknowing” is from Robert Smithson’s “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” a seminal essay in the genealogy of stoned thinking. While Smithson’s formulation of an “abstract geology” was predicated on an entropic sublime, a decomposition of mind into matter, the petric poetics operative here reflects a new materialist turn, where vibrant matter and a slow mind, a stoned reverie, resonate and reverberate.

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  1. Signifying Stones Paul A. Harris

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