This official Fench dispatch was sent out by the AFP on July 22, 2016, over 6 months before the actual piece was created in space.
Dispatch translation:
French astronaut Thomas Pesquet to perform "space poetry" at the ISS
PARIS, July 22, 2016 (AFP) - French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who is scheduled to join the International Space Station (ISS) in mid-November, will be the agent of a "poetic performance" in space, imagined by American artist Eduardo Kac, announced CNES, the French space agency.
Called "Inner Telescope", it will be "very simple", explains Thomas Pesquet, interviewed by phone by the AFP, and will only require a few sheets of paper and a pair of scissors. It will be a matter of making the word "MOI" appear through cutting and folding; "Inner Telescope", will float in the ISS in weightlessness.
"It will refer to both distant observation and introspection," explains the astronaut of the European Space Agency (ESA). "It is not me who created this performance. I'm not capable of inventing things like that.
I like the idea of leaving room in the ISS for something other than technology and science," explains Thomas Pesquet, who will carry out this performance on Sunday in his free time. The astronauts are a bit like ambassadors for the Earth.
Artist Eduardo Kac met with Thomas Pesquet at the European Astronaut Center in Cologne (Germany) to explain to him how the work will be performed, says Gérard Azoulay, head of the Space Observatory at CNES (Centre national d'études spatiales).
Born in 1962, Eduardo Kac is the author of a "manifesto of space poetry" in which he states that "poetry will be able to unfold in new forms when language is freed from the constraints of gravity," according to the Space Observatory.
$300