Alexander Burenkov: Can you speak about the conceptual tension between manual and digital processes in your work? How does this interplay function not just technically, but ideologically?

Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel: I employ three different techniques. First, I design on an iPad and then manually reproduce the drawings on a larger scale. Second, I draw directly on paper using custom curved rulers that I developed myself. Third, I begin with a hand drawing, photograph it, apply digital effects like zoom distortions, and then redraw the entire image by hand, turning digital glitches into physical marks. These processes create images that play with perception. From afar, my black-and-white checkerboard patterns look crisp and machine made. But up close, they break down into grids, pixels, and abstract shapes. Although they look like prints, every mark is drawn by hand. What seems like a pixelated grid made instantly on a screen is actually the result of weeks of careful pencil work. Each dot is placed by hand. This shift in scale invites viewers to rethink how images are created. The uncertainty here goes beyond the visual, it is also about presence and tactility. Inspired by Vera Molnar's algorithmic drawings, especially her 1974-piece Love Story, I try to bring a tactile and human quality to digital forms that often feel distant. This slow, deliberate process challenges the common idea that digital images are quick and effortless.

AB: There’s a recurring theme in your work of inhabiting slowness—both in your meticulous drawing process and in the resistance to screen-based speed. Is slowness a form of aesthetic resistance?

KM: The temporal aspect of my practice deliberately contrasts with the rapid pace of contemporary image circulation. Spending weeks on the manual reproduction of what digital processes achieve in milliseconds establishes a different relationship to visual information. This duration allows for a deeper structural understanding of the image that rapid consumption cannot provide. The physical demands of sustained mark-making turn the act of drawing into something close to a performance. Extended periods of focused gesture, often accompanied by ambient music, push the body toward a unique kind of exhaustion. This process acts as both meditation and endurance test, reestablishing the connection between physical labor and image production. This commitment to durational process extends beyond my current practice to my interest in pre-digital graphic design methods. The Letraset transfer sheets, texture screens, and collage techniques that designers used before computers similarly required extended time and physical engagement, with each letter transferred by hand, each texture carefully positioned. These analog tools demand the same kind of sustained attention that I cultivate in my drawing practice. While my approach isn't nostalgic, I value practices that resist the speed and efficiency of digital production.

AB: Your drawings often simulate the appearance of mechanically reproduced prints. What does it mean for you to hand-draw what looks like a machine-made image?

KM: If I were to print my digital drawings at a large scale, they'd appear pixelated. But when I redraw them by hand, line by line, I can make them look even more “digital” than the computer could. My hand doesn’t suffer the same deterioration that happens when an image is enlarged, which is the opposite of what you'd expect. This reversal works on several levels. We often assume machines are more precise than hands, but precision really depends on what you’re measuring. When I manually redraw my digital drawings, I eliminate the pixelation and breakdown you'd normally see when an image is enlarged. Yet, the lines I draw by hand are less regular than the digital ones. They bring a human touch, a certain imperfection, and a subtle vibration. So, hand drawing removes digital deterioration but simultaneously adds a layer of human transformation. I deliberately use old graphics tablets that introduce bugs and glitches when I work with complex forms and multiple layers. These glitches generate interesting textures as I draw. In today’s age of automation and AI image generation, where anything can be created instantly, I find it compelling to manually imitate digital aesthetics. It feels like a response to digital tools trying to mimic handmade qualities, or machines copying human gestures and behaviors. This process becomes a way of reintroducing physical effort and bodily presence into digital images.

AB: You mention resisting reproduction as a strategy. Could this resistance be read as a form of critique against the fluid replicability of the digital image?

KM: When someone tries to photograph my drawings, the camera creates interference patterns that weren't there originally. The work resists being flattened into a digital file. You have to stand in front of it to truly see what it is. This resistance isn't a deliberate critique but something that naturally emerges from my process and reveals how we experience images differently. My drawings need to be seen in person to be fully understood. In my black-and-white pieces, I use thick oil-based inks that create subtle surface textures and variations in density. I also hide patterns within the black areas that only reveal themselves through direct observation. These physical qualities give the work its depth and complexity, something that simply cannot be digitized or shared online. The resistance stems from the fundamental incompatibility between physical mark-making and digital reproduction. What appears as systematic visual interference in photographs actually points to the irreducible difference between experiencing images in physical space versus on a screen.

AB: How do glitches, pixels, and moiré patterns operate in your work—are they aesthetic accidents, structural metaphors, or tools of disorientation?

KM: When your phone screen can't handle a complex pattern, it creates these shimmering effects. I'm not just copying that look; I'm using it as a vocabulary. These mistakes reveal the limits of the technology displaying the image. They are not just accidents; they are central to how I construct images. Moiré patterns, bugs, and other digital quirks become part of a visual alphabet, alongside textures, contrasts, and disruptions of visual rhythm. Technically, they occur when digital tools are pushed beyond their intended limits. Pixelation happens when the resolution isn't enough for the image's complexity, while moiré effects arise from interference between overlapping patterns. Like Wade Guyton's work with malfunctioning printers where technical failures become expressive gestures, these digital artifacts reveal the mechanical processes usually hidden beneath smooth interfaces. They expose the compression, translation, and approximation inherent to digital reproduction. These compression effects become especially visible when complex patterns collide with technical limits of screens. When scaled down and viewed on screens, images that are rich in details often produce moiré effects: those shimmering patterns that were central to 1960s Op Art and psychedelic visuals. Now they're back, but unintentionally: the result of a clash between intricate patterns and screen resolution. This phenomenon creates perceptual uncertainty. These effects disrupt the way we read images, making it difficult to distinguish between intentional precision and systemic error, between what is meant to be sharp and what appears blurred as a result of digital processing.

AB: Your recent sculptural work extends this inquiry into three-dimensional space. At Jardins d’Étretat, you presented razzle / d’oiseaux (1–3), a series of kinetic aluminium sculptures that echo the forms of weather vanes and the camouflage patterns known as razzle-dazzle. Influenced by the site's native birdlife and dynamic meteorology, the works inhabit a paradoxical status: mobile yet fixed, abstract yet referential, geometric yet immersed in a living environment. The use of aluminium and graphic abstraction evokes both modern industrial materials and ancient ornamental systems. How do you see this relationship between past and future, craft and code?

KM: Weather vanes function both as practical objects and cultural symbols, often encoding regional identity through their forms: boats and roosters in Normandy, or architectural motifs tied to local heritage. This tradition of embedding meaning in functional objects echoes ancient writing systems like hieroglyphs, where image and meaning are intertwined. With a background in graphic design and typography, I was naturally drawn to how these historical forms of visual communication relate to contemporary signage and pictograms. This led me to become interested in creating sculptures that function like coded signage, inviting viewers to interpret layers of meaning rather than receive immediate legible messages. This approach to visual communication has historical precedents in military applications, particularly in razzle-dazzle camouflage. This naval technique from the early 20th century wasn't designed to conceal ships but to disrupt perception of their direction, speed, and size. Applied to my sculptures, these vertical striping creates a similar visual disruption, amplified with wind movement, bridging historical military strategy with contemporary sculptural practice. Both the camouflage patterns and weather vane forms rely on distillation: reducing complex information to essential visual elements that communicate powerfully. The use of aluminum embodies this relationship between past and future. While chosen pragmatically for its lightness when installed on Étretat's fragile terrain, aluminum references both modern industrial production and the long tradition of metalworking in weather vane construction.

AB: Oscillating between drawing, signal, and ornament, these sculptures bring post-digital aesthetics into dialogue with architectural heritage and natural motion. In their shifting reflections and spatial ambiguity, they resist both pictorial resolution and digital capture. Why, in your opinion, people should go to Étretat and experience these sculptures in person and not be content with their photo documentation? What makes it special the physical encounter with your sculptures?

KM: The sculptures are designed to interact with their environment. They spin with the wind, catch and reflect light, and shift depending on the angle, lighting, and movement around them. A photograph might capture a static moment, but it can't convey that sense of movement and transformation. The sculptures are flat, which creates an interesting effect: from certain viewpoints, they appear as nothing more than a straight line, almost like a visual glitch in a 3D model. You can only appreciate this dimensional play by walking around them and discovering how they transform as you change your perspective. Their ability to appear and disappear depending on the viewer’s position creates a kind of visual dialogue with the viewer that no single image could ever fully produce.

AB: You’ve described your forms as oscillating between symbol and abstraction. What kind of “reading” or viewing do you hope this ambiguity invites?

KM: I want the work to remain open to interpretation. The oscillation between symbol and abstraction prevents the work from being pinned down to a single meaning or interpretation. These wind vanes might be read as abstract poetic signs waiting to be to decoded, a navigation system, ancient symbols, fragments of modern graphic design that escaped into the landscape, or even industrial flowers growing in an organic garden.

AB: How does the garden setting at Étretat alter the reception of your sculptures? What new dialogues emerge between your geometries and the organic flow of the landscape?

KM: What I really like about the Jardins d'Étretat is that there's something very artificial, surreal, and controlled about them. I think my sculptures reinforce and play with those notions. The gardens themselves already feel like a strange, theatrical landscape, carefully designed and sculpted, even its natural elements. Creating three weather vanes of different heights instead of a single one and installing them at different heights on the molehills was a way for me to play with the undulating topography of the Jardins. Despite being tall (between 3.5 and 4 meters) to catch the wind, they end up at eye level for viewers. When there’s no wind and the sculptures are still, their flatness creates an uncanny effect: they appear like flat geometric images, like a drawing, suspended in a three-dimensional and very organic environment. It's almost like a digital collage where different visual languages suddenly collide within the same environment.

AB: The term “post-digital” implies that digital technology is no longer novel, but ubiquitous. How does your work interrogate or reflect this condition?

KM: We use smartphones and computers everyday but rarely pause to think about how they actually work. My drawings make visible what usually stays hidden: the pixel grids, the compression, the fact that every image is just data arranged into patterns. I'm not trying to celebrate or critique this, I’m just pointing it out. The sculptures at Étretat reflect the same tension. They look like digital renderings or interface elements that have somehow materialized in the landscape. When flat and motionless, they have that graphic, almost screen-like quality. But then the wind sets them in motion, you’re confronted with their physical presence: their metallic material, their weight, their movement. It's this shift between digital appearance and analog behavior that interests me and feels characteristic of the moment we’re currently living.

AB: Could you elaborate on how your interest in Moroccan craftsmanship and Arabic calligraphy informs your visual language—especially as you approach them from a non-linguistic, abstract standpoint?

KM: Traditional Amazigh carpets function as coded systems where each symbol carries specific meaning. Women would weave their lived realities into these patterns, encoding details about family dynamics, social conditions, and personal experiences through geometric arrangements. The carpet becomes a form of written record, a way of preserving information through thread. This parallel with computing became even more striking when I studied the Jacquard loom's punch card system. Both weaving and computing rely on binary logic: thread over or under, hole or no hole, pixel on or off. Simple elements combine to generate complex structures of meaning. This connection between textile and digital systems reveals something fundamental about how we organize and transmit visual information. What compels me about Arab visual culture is its relationship to density and accumulation. Moroccan interiors present layered pattern systems where rugs, textiles, tilework, and metalwork create visually saturated environments. This abundance generates a particular kind of viewing experience, one that resists the focused attention demanded by Western minimalism. The eye cannot settle on a single element but must navigate through overlapping visual elements. This sensory overload has become a structuring principle in my own work, where dense mark-making creates similarly immersive viewing conditions. In "The Ornament: Form and Meaning in Islamic Art," Oleg Grabar develops the idea that Islamic art creates an aesthetic based on repetition, variation, and the proliferation of motifs. These motifs often carry a contemplative or even spiritual function, drawing the viewer beyond the visible. I feel a strong affinity with this idea. In this regard, an observation by Arnauld Pierre offers a meaningful historical resonance. In "Magic Moirés: Gerald Oster et l’art des moirages", Arnauld Pierre discusses Salvador Dalí’s fascination with moiré patterns, noting that Dalí spoke of their hypothetical “Arabic origins” [sic], comparing them to the interlaced designs of Arab-Muslim ornamentation. Dalí believed that, through these forms, the visual dimension of the Muslim paradise became accessible. This intersection of visual complexity and meaning-making extends to another aspect of Arab culture that has profoundly influenced my practice: Arabic calligraphy. Since I don't speak Arabic, I approach these letterforms purely as visual phenomena, liberated from their linguistic content. Writing becomes pure form: lines, curves, and compositions that I can engage with on their own terms. This non-linguistic relationship has led me to develop a personal visual alphabet where forms oscillate between symbol and abstraction.

AB: Do you see your drawings and sculptures as part of the same system, or do they represent distinct registers of your thinking about image and form?

KM: Yes, I see them as part of the same system, even though they take different forms. My drawings and sculptures both come from the conceptual foundation. The sculptures are a way for me to bring what happens on paper into physical space. While they might look flat at first glance, they play with the tension between two and three dimensions. They can feel almost like digital images or photomontages that have stepped into the real world. Many of the ideas I explore in drawings—grids, moiré effects, and vector-like shapes—also find their way into the sculptures. My process usually starts with sketches on paper. I then rework those shapes digitally before having them laser-cut, assembled, and painted. Sometimes, I add small ornamental elements such as the half-spheres on my Papageno sculpture in Genk. These touches draw inspiration from both industrial architecture and decorative doors I’ve seen in Morocco. They create subtle shadows and volumes on otherwise flat surfaces. So while the drawings focus more on image and illusion, the sculptures allow me to explore the same visual language in physical space. For me, they are simply two parts of one continuous practice.