⁰¹ Yiannis Melanitis, Kryographia, 2010, installation
⁰² Yiannis Melanitis, the cast of Kryographia, final cast of lead on ice, 2010. A sculpture as a metaphor for the entropic loss of the performance.
⁰³ Yiannis Melanitis, Kryographia, 2010, installation. Photo: Maria Boukaouri.
⁰⁴ Yiannis Melanitis, Kryographia, at the studio, 2010.
⁰⁵⁻⁰⁸ Yiannis Melanitis, Kryographia, 2010, installation. Photo: Maria Boukaouri.
⁰⁹ Yiannis Melanitis, Kryographia, just before the final casting, 2010. Photo: Maria Boukaouri.

On 14 October 2010, at the exhibition space of About, the visual artist Yiannis Melanitis installed his work Kryographia [img. 01]. The main body of the artwork consisted of medical equipment and mechanisms that transformed, through the process of writing, ice into water and vice-versa. Kryographia’s final scrap was a lead cast on ice.

The performance began by copying the text The Act of Writing by writer Evi Voyiatzaki, which is part of the work The Body in the Text / James Joyce’s Ulysses and the Modern Greek Novel. Through the act of writing and the use of vacuum, a valve was activated, setting into motion a certain amount of water. At the end of each line, a pair of electrodes detected the movement of the scribe and communicated with an electro-valve, which momentarily would open, releasing the liquid. While moving through a system of glass pipes, the fluid would freeze. In the end, all the somatic energy, the act of writing, was crystallised in a metallic shell, a mould, an empty body, as molten lead was casted on ice with the help of two assistants. [img. 02]

Myrto Digoni: How did Kryographia come about?

Yiannis Melanitis: It started out as a study on the nature of time. Time, in contemporary thought, can be defined as the movement of space itself; during this movement another dimension is produced: time. But, in order to study something, time should be made still. The three dimensions of space, without the time dimension, is a state that can be observed during the lesson of biological anatomy. The subject under scrutiny is rendered dead after the ‘withdrawal’ of one dimension, in order for it to become an object of study. Contrary to the quantum world, the term of ‘static time’ in the empirical world is inappropriate. However, time is not absolute; moreover it is not necessary continuous, since there is a limit, which, in the discernable time-space, one cannot overcome. It sounds like a paradox … It is important to try to dwell exactly there: on the intervals between time segments.

MD: Today, how does one create sculpture?

YM: I think that it is the spatialisation of time that, today, makes possible the existence of sculpture. In sculpture, I am drawn to the concept of ‘matter’ — or, to be more precise, the concept of energy, which involves time-parameters. Such a stand does not bother with any kind of aesthetics — besides, today’s sculpture stalemates are rooted in aesthetics, and it is often impossible for someone to accept that a cell, which a scientist manipulates in biology, is in fact a sculptural unit.

MD: The energy cell of Kryographia is the word?

YM: While making Kryographia, I was thinking that one can start from the following position: that a word, or more precisely a concept, is related to one (given) state of energy. Then, successive transformations of the concept cause successive transformations of energy — something that in sculpture becomes visible through matter. Duchamp proposed such a dictionary of concepts, A l’infinitif, as a manual for artists … Methodologically, the contrary may also be true: one starts from the world then moves on to concepts. Regarding this issue that was already raised in the ancient times, Parmenides stated: ‘Το γαρ αυτό νοείν εστίν και είναι’ [For it is the same thing that can be thought and be]. This passage was translated in various ways. Parmenides seems to consider being and noesis as equivalents. The entity that ‘thinks’ also ‘is’. This sentence, although being an odd tautology, redefines the noetic content of the world; it also introduces a prerequisite: the existence of the ‘thinking observer’. In trying to further explore this space that ‘froze’, the need to study the concept of entropy ensued, as did the subsequent manipulation of the energy. The concept of entropy thus was viewed as something measurable and potentially malleable. It constitutes the most important aspect of the work. Life is often associated with warmness while death with coldness and ice. But contrary to this metaphor, the closer we are to the vicinity of absolute zero temperatures, energy losses are reduced to a minimum (superconductivity). The ice in Kryographia constitutes a natural trap and also a noetic one. Although the writer is placed in a state of absolute coldness, the conductivity of his writing increases. This is the contradiction inherent in every human situation.

MD: While studying the handling of energy, you put the writer up on the stage and expose his (written) logos.

YM: I assume the position of the writer and I produce a certain amount of energy, which can never be reused in its initial form. The writer produces an entropic loss, and there is no way to balance the status of the final text with his initial energy status: thus the writer always fails. In the performance, the initial energy of the writer remains insulated within the room — in this case within the About gallery. In order to handle the movement of energy in a work of art, we can start by imagining the artist confined in a restricted space, trapped in a thermodynamic situation, which he tries to overcome. The next steps could include:
• The design of a self-cooling machine that collapses after operating a specific time.
• The manipulation, in sculptural terms, of the text’s (logos’) transformation.

MD: But, beyond being a parable of the act of writing, it seems to me that the choice of the writer and the manipulation of the writer’s energy, as shown in Kryographia, comment on the political economy of the body, proposing a more complex reading of its history. Nowadays the body of the worker has supposedly evolved into a sign producing body; in parallel industrial work (tangible and measurable) has shifted to what we call postmodern work (intangible, digital, involving signs and communication). But you chose to exhibit the body of a scribe absorbed in manual tasks. Were you trying to stress that today’s ‘immaterial body’ is still a privilege of a few?

YM: I wanted to emphasise that every kind of work/activity has a bio-mechanical dimension. According today’s perception, text, knowledge, science and information may constitute the new model of work — and worktime ceases being the gauge of labour. But that does not accurately reflect reality. Worktime remains measurable. Today, for the majority of the population, the body remains an object, a medium for usage. The dematerialised image of the body, a central issue during the past decades, especially as far as the American critical thought is concerned, met via the biogenetics revolution a new body, with a new biological structure, that morphed out of the decoded and recoded core of our genetic constitution. Without a uniform image of the body, philosophy must also remain ‘unstable’; aiming to map a totally new field of meanings — or at least attempting to draw up closer to them. In fact, I am not even sure we can speak of something immaterial as opposed to the alleged materiality of the world.

MD: In Kryographia, besides the body of the writer, that we watch performing, we can discern another body, a dismembered body, as the installation brings to mind organs scattered on the ground. For example, close to the writer, the glass flask looks like a large heart, the thin glass tubes and the plastic pipes on the black cloth look like intestines, and the aluminum-mountain resembles skin [img. 04–06]. And the Obs-bed [img. 03] looks like the dead body minutes before its imminent dismantling.

YM: Such a mise-en-scène was not premeditated. A lot of time passed by before a connection of the ‘concepts’ with the ‘objects’ was carved out, while I was manipulating the energies within Kryographia. It is when I looked at the completed installation in my studio that I realised that a ‘body’ might have arisen …

MD: … a decapitated and anarchist body. A body that generates ‘chaosmic’ continuities, beyond human and organic limits. As in the case of the Body Without Organs of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

YM: For the last couple of years, I have been preoccupied with the Body Without Organs, a concept originally created by Antonin Artaud. Not so much from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s standpoint, but as a projection of the corporeality on one plane, precisely on the plane of the paper, upon which Artaud draws. Imagine a two-dimensional sketch that proposes the contour of a body — without its internal organs. This drawing is ‘closed’. By that I mean that the line returns to its starting point. It is glued on one plane from which it cannot become detached: the paper plane. If you lift it, the plane will also rise. In Artaud’s case, the body itself is the subject and the object of treachery; illness drives Artaud to redefine the connections between concept and matter and to use paper as an organic projection surface, whereupon visible and ideal intertwine. Artaud’s effort is a perceptive process in order to discover a cognitive algorithm, through which he could realise some sort of representative drawing. Illness, undoubtedly, determined Artaud’s dialectic relation to his body; in parallel, it opened up in his thought an anti-Renaissance version of the body, in its historical and medical sense: from it, nothing can be generated but it can sense treason, the erroneous metaphor. Artaud is obsessed with his inability to get from the idea to the drawing, to its realisation. Such a failure is orchestrated and revealed in Kryographia. The author is unable to transcend the environmental status. Marcel Proust insulates with cork the room where he writes In Search of Time Lost, Friedrich Nietzsche chooses to isolate himself, etc. We can observe a specific trend, an attitude built around it …

MD: But I also see another affinity with Antonin Artaud’s thought. In the accompanying catalogue of the exhibition you state that: ‘In Kryographia, since the texts have been written in advance, the calligrapher plays the part of the anatomist who rearranges the body of the work.’ Artaud also believes that the body should be rearranged, that the organs which are viewed as God’s accomplices must be thrown away, in order to root out the cunning, divine hierarchy and christian thought [i].

YM: Certainly, the conceptual correlations, which are produced in the form of a sequence, have an anatomic basis. Verbal associations result from these correlations, which work as magnetic fields: each word is the attractor of another word. These combinations do not follow a grammatical or linear thinking. They follow an anagrammatic thinking, in an absolutely random way. Embodiment — in Kryographia — occurs while making the moulds; a word is a womb, an maternal form that generates another copy, not a facsimile, but a copy that is associated to another word. Here the word works as a negative space, a codified archetype that looks like a seal (one could also think of the complementarity of the bi-lockable DNA bases).

MD: As it is the case with puzzles or anagrams — and the portmanteaux created by Lewis Carroll.

YM: It is worth mentioning that one of the first puzzles proposed by Lewis Carroll was the morphing of the word HEAD into TAIL (HEADTAIL): HEAD-HEAL-TEAL-TELL-TALL-TAIL. Thus the first puzzle was ‘anatomical’.

MD: Another great writer, James Joyce, highlighted the associative and metaphorical movement of thought, linking it with a somatic experience of the world. In his novel Ulysses he associates his 8 AM scene (The House) with the colour orange and the human kidneys, the 11 AM scene (The Graveyard) with black, white, and the human heart, and the noon scene (The Newspaper) with red and the lungs, etc. [ii].

YM: Indeed. He also stated ‘I am the flesh that always affirms’.

MD: If I am not mistaken, Kryographia springs from Joyce?

YM: Kryographia springs from one word: the word ‘ICE’, which I seek in Finnegans Wake [img. 09]. Joyce moves between the pole of intellect and the pole of life like no other author of his century. His writing appears, in philological terms, as a chaotic conception; it can also be described as writing inside the flesh, fiddling with the core of humanity. Finnegans Wake, albeit written during the modernist period, is a work that goes beyond modernism, transcending any kind of formalism that derives from the modernist analysis; and in doing so it becomes its Wake. It is crucial to highlight that Joyce knew he was on a mission: to declare the end of modernism with the end of language as a mono-perspective system, and to go back to the original state of humankind, where noesis is akin to the genius of a toddler and language indicates mainly through sound and groans rather than its meanings. I do not think that there is any other book that has brought a bigger confusion in the history of literature. It is an absolute statement, an unsurpassable work, beyond any categorisation — but it may be the work that categorises all other works. In the first paragraph of Finnegans Wake, one can read: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs”. Please pay attention to the phrase ‘from swerve of shore to bend of bay’. The movements of the coastline are rendered thanks to two conjunctions, which have a similar meaning: ‘swerve’ and ‘bend’. Also, the word ‘shore’ is conceptually related to the word ‘bay’. Thus, each conjunction has been chosen to produce a sound rhythm, which in turn brings out its conceptual correlation.


In the catalogue of Kryographia all possible crosswords between certain words are proposed. One strategy is the following: we choose a certain number of words (concepts to be more precise) from the original selection. Then, by correlating two words, we try to discern the new concept that emerges following this conjunction. E.g. the terms thermo- + thermo- generate the term desertification, the combination of the terms mouth and machine generates the term politics, etc.

ice, thermo, machine, lead, mouth, land, thermo, desertification, timemachine, thermometer, fever, iceland/geiger, machine, machinery of time, war, dentistry, literature, factorisation, lead evaporation, plasticity, merging, grayness, superconductivity, mouth, logos, politics, abuse, kiss, openness, land, nostalgia, agriculture, mine, lunch, nationalism

Possible correlations between the words ice and land (Y. Melanitis, from the work Kryographia, 2010)

From ‘cold (kryo)’ to ‘thermo (warm)’:
Kryon-Krymn (κρημνός), Kremo-Thermo-Thremma (θρέμμα)-Thermo


MD: The networking of language in art and architecture is an issue that you raise and analyse in your PhD thesis, isn’t it?

YM: The subject of my thesis at the NTUA is Models and Biological Dynamics in Art and Architecture. I examine the written text as a code and the word as a cast, and I confront/compare them with biological parameters (e.g. the complementarity of the DNA). In sequences standardised in such a way, we can detect more general connections within the population of the genetic databases; something ‘similar’ can be observed in the 18th chapter of Ulyssses, where words appear as a codified series, or in Finnegans Wake, where we are figuratively imprinted by rhythmic sound patterns. Joyce asks us to listen in order to understand his ‘incomprehensible’: “Lord knows what my prose means. In a word, it’s pleasing to the ear. And your drawings are pleasing to the eye. That is enough, it seems to me.” [iii] If we listen to the text as if it was a sound work, we apprehend different grammatical structures that transcend commonplace rationality. A complex conceptual sequence, as in the case of poetry or the biological code, can have different meanings distributed in various typological readings.

MD: The intrusion of text in art and the ‘visual’ usage of the word go a long way. In conceptual art, the neon works do not mean something. The word is a mere form, a sculpture.

YM: The one who actually introduced the word in the artwork is Duchamp. He did so in two different ways: either using the word as an autonomous entity, or as something that was related to an object. Let’s take as an example his work In Advance of the Broken Arm. There was a need to import the text in the visual discourse. But the object cannot be transcended; the object appears in order to set apart the artist from the scribe …

MD: The word is essentially form, a visual element and not a vector of meaning?

YM: A series of drawings in Kryographia transform the word ‘Kryographia’ in the contour of a glacier. [iv] The word/concept ‘ice’ and the word/concept ‘mountain’, cannot be denoted by itself, since it is the observer whom affects the measurement; like in Kryographia, he is part of his experiment …

MD: Is it the form of the word that pushes you to sketch this mountain or is it the meaning of the word?

YM: Nowadays we are beyond the meanings of words. The artist cannot do anything, nor does he know how to. Exactly at this point, he thinks he must start … Well … En route, you may encounter the mountain once more. But then again it might not matter at all, it might hold no meaning for you!

MD: What does one take with him, on the road?

YM: The act of writing generates energy junk, the ‘waste’. This corresponds to what you leave behind, at the foothill, in order to ascend the mountain …

MD: In Kryographia you equated artistic praxis (the performance) with the scientific experiment. In short, what you did was Pataphysics, was it not?

YM: I think that Alfred Jarry’s Pataphysics is the most sophisticated science! And one day possibly all sciences will come to that …


[i] Antonin Artaud: “Je dis, pour lui refaire son anatomie. L’homme est malade parce qu’il est mal construit. Il faut se décider à le mettre à nu pour lui gratter cet animalcule qui le démange mortellement, dieu, et avec dieu ses organes.”, Œuvres complètes, Vol. XIII, Gallimard, p. 104.
[ii] Around 1920, James Joyce drew the Linati Schema to help a friend (Carlo Linati) understand the fundamental structure of his novel Ulysses, ‘an epic of two races and at the same time the cycle of the human body’. In this schema different episodes are associated with different parts of the human body, mythological heroes and colours.
[iii] James Joyce, in Richard Elmman, James Joyce, p. 702.
[iv] In one of Hokusai’s last self-portraits, the way the body is rendered is quite similar to the letters on its border, in order to illustrate his adage: ‘every stroke should be life!’