Le tombeau de Mallarmé

An engineer by training, Erthos Albino de Souza applied conceptual or physical mathematical models to the construction or deconstruction of texts. The graphic poem Le Tombeau de Mallarmé is a good demonstration of this process. He created a program for distributing temperatures and applied them to a heated fluid that runs through the interior of a tube. This program allowed a different design to be obtained based on the different temperatures of the fluids in the various sections of the tube. But since the engineer-poet coded his graphic system in such a way that each temperature scale corresponds to one of the letters of Mallarmé’s name, the result is that the letters are spatially arranged and form configurations that are vaguely reminiscent of Mallarmé’s “tomb.” By heating the fluid at different temperatures, he achieved different graphic schemes and thus different configurations of Mallarmé’s name, where the graphic sequence composes the poem.

(Source: Itaú Cultural. English translation: Luciana Gattass)