Le Journal du brise-lames is an epic poem told to tetrapods. Le Journal du brise-lames is a documented essay on the Sète breakwater, which uses its body to protect the port from the sea. Le Journal du brise-lames is a play in which each voice carries a fiction within it. Le Journal du brise-lames is a novel that plumbs the depths of porous concrete, violent water and the currents of time. Le Journal du brise-lames is a unique video game created by Stéphane Gantelet that lets you see Le Journal du brise-lames breathe, access to which is included with the purchase of this book. Of course, the Breakwater Diary is also a diary. It speaks for itself. And it’s addressed to you.
Living matter caught up in an incessant to-and-fro that evokes as much the rhythm of the tides as the circuit of blood in a human body, this hybrid work never ceases to incarnate and reincarnate itself in the form of those non-coagulating flows of words of which only Juliette Mézenc has the secret.
Guillaume Vissac

Le Journal du brise-lame is distributed by Publie.net as a book including the text and/or video game (video game and book are in French only !).
https://www.publie.net/briselames/

About the vidéo game :

The « Breakwater Diary » is a literary FPS : the reader moves in subjective camera in a virtual environment where reading/traveling earns life points. In other words, it’s a new kind of video game. It’s not a question of killing zombies, but rather of surveying a landscape, contemplating, listening to or reading texts. Playing with the aesthetics of the game : showing « poorly finished » images, turning life bars into reading bars, playing with the game’s codes, navigation, levels and particular relationship to time to create a new writing and reading experience, somewhere between video game and literature.

• Le Journal du brise-lames offers free navigation in 3D spaces on 4 levels. Texts are arranged in reading bubbles. To be listened to, or read if you want to mute the sound (in French only). Reading is triggered by the player’s wanderings, who is master of time and space. The texts are read by Juliette Mézenc and are the only audio files in the game. The other sounds are produced procedurally (code) by the player’s actions.

• The game also features a travel log, which collects screenshots taken when entering a reading bubble and stores them on the player’s hard disk, and a notebook, which collects texts produced by the player in the Newtopie editor (Newtopie level).

• The game features a profile and save system, allowing multiple players to save their « games » in the playlist for later retrieval. Elements of the game’s « internal kitchen » regularly appear in windows (mostly game objects required for the level being activated), with a way to set visible the data needed to produce the image displayed in real time on the screen.

• The game is available for Windows and Mac computers (32- or 64-bit versions).

You can also find videopoems from the « Breakwater Diary » video game in the « Videopoems » section.

The « Journal du Brise-lames » was presented at Beaubourg as part of the « Extra » festival in 2020. An entire room housed the project’s ecosystem, with two video poems, the free access to the vidéo game and the book.

The in situ images above were taken during the exhibition at the Beaubourg center in Paris as part of the “Extra !” festival.

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