A Coding Heuristic

Another aspect worthy of attention can be observed, regarding the way artists take hold of and work with algorithms, outside any logic that a pre-established goal would impose.

Indeed, from a personal sensation experienced during practice, largely confirmed in exchanges with artists working with digital images, emerge the traits of a particular way of working with algorithms, in frank opposition to the use and production of algorithms within industrial logics.

By way of example, let us recall the words with which Toni Mitjanit refers to his approach, in which coding occupies, as we have seen, a central place:

I try to write a code in programming languages such as Processing, Java or C++ that simulates that natural phenomenon. Later I go weird adding randomness, machine learning, data, audio reactivity, user interaction, etc… to extend the initial concept and explore new ways¹.

In Mitjanit’s words we find a way of working with the algorithm characteristic of its creative use, in which code is not approached solely as a means of reaching specific objectives decided beforehand – for example, through a set of specifications –, but, on the contrary, the moment of coding is invested, on the basis of its specificities, as an instance from which new aspects can arise that will come to enrich the artist’s intentions. Using the terminology we have developed in this chapter, one would have to say that the moment of coding is a fundamental stage of the creative process, during which the intention-image – a notion that we construct from the image-system that Gilbert Simondon mobilizes in the context of technical invention, and that we have brought close to artistic intentionality – at the origin of the project can welcome new data, can be enriched by experiential contact with matter, can take part in the actualization of what we have called the algorithmic virtual.

Hence, we would be entitled to ask whether creative coding does not offer itself as a specific instance, bearing witness to a heuristic capacity: work with code, with its own articulations and specificities, would be capable of triggering the discovery of new forms and new aspects linked to the work in gestation.

The work and words of Jacques Perconte help to clarify this dynamic. In our exchanges, the artist pointed to “contact with the image” as the moment of discovery, of surprise². Perconte also maintains that he makes notations, because this “helps one think”. So far nothing about code, except that before each project the artist takes care to rewrite all of his algorithmic tools, which can be interpreted as the intention to widen the domain of the unknown, to modify the initial conditions, with the aim of reaching a new human-machine balance unforeseen at the outset. This resonates with the experience reported by Jean Detheux, an artist who pursues within the digital a research that began with the traditional arts (drawing, painting, music):

It is a fact that once things fall into place and become predictable, either I stop, or go “elsewhere”. I absolutely have to be on unknown or unpredictable ground for the work to nourish me³.

Indeed, once the system adopts a predictable, machinic logic, the room for discovery and surprise shrinks; one can then no longer expect the activity of coding to enrich the universe of the work. When code imposes itself, the artist seeks to destabilize it, to divert it from its ruts, to upset a dynamic that is closing in on itself, adding openness and the unforeseen.

This bears witness to the ambivalent nature of the bond established between the artist and code: this bond can prove productive, but it can also draw the artist into an impoverished dynamic. In this, code echoes any technological apparatus the artist may take hold of, but which was not designed with a creative purpose in mind⁴.

The dynamic that sets in between the artist and his means of production, which can evolve toward openness but can also close up in a non-productive logic, is described, from different conceptual frameworks, by what may be called the “theories of the apparatus⁵”. These take into account the fact that all the industrial apparatuses available to artistic activity carry in their design conditionings that reveal their instrumental side.

Vilém Flusser belongs to this current when he asserts in his 1983 essay, Pour une philosophie de la photographie, that a dialectical relation sets the photographic camera against the photographer: the latter must play against the capture dispositif if he wishes the unforeseen to emerge. In the same spirit, there is the distinction between the logic of the apparatus (appareil) and that of the dispositif as formulated by Jean-Louis Déotte: the same technological object, depending on its use, can “make appear”, or else it can act in the direction of the alienation of man by technology. The reflection of Theodor W. Adorno, for whom “artistic productivity is the capacity to introduce the arbitrary into the non-arbitrary⁶”, contributes to the critique of industrial means when they are mobilized by art. Finally, in the same vein, but within a general mode of thought that transcends aesthetic reflection, we find the notion of pharmakon introduced by Bernard Stiegler, who sees every technical element as carrying an alienating potential but also a potential for emancipation. These theories reveal the double edge of technology in its bond with the human, an aspect that is forcefully expressed within apparatus-based artistic processes.

As regards the activity of coding, and drawing on a personal felt sense at the moment of practice, it would probably be appropriate to contrast, on the one hand, a way of coding that can be called analytic (valid for industry) and, on the other, a synthetic way of working with code.

Industrial, analytic coding would have as its starting point a “set of specifications” stipulating precisely the functionalities expected of the finished code, and would then break the problem down into several sub-parts programmed from the outset with well-defined expectations. Synthetic coding, for its part, begins with a few lines of code, often quite precarious, but already linked to the creative production of images (or sounds). Within this dynamic, the code develops by becoming more complex until a “resolution” is reached that could not have been entirely anticipated from the outset. Synthetic coding therefore unfolds through slippages, blockages, surprises, permanently haunted by the possibility of failure when “nothing happens⁷”. If need be, the point is to upset the initial conditions (like Perconte, who rewrites his algorithmic tools before each project), in order to force a path outside the system. This bears witness to a way of acting that avoids the beaten paths, that escapes control, mastery, and that values indecision, favoring what Derrida conceives as the “ethical moment”, which is, in the words of Patrick Nardin: “that of the suspension of all knowledge, of the absence of norms, that of uncertainty⁸”.

1. Excerpt from exchanges with the artist in December 2020. Original English quote.↩︎

2. This is entirely consistent with the apprehension of the algorithmic virtual as described in the preceding paragraphs: a form of the virtual that is actualized in an embodied way, during the affective reception of the image on the part of the artist.↩︎

3. Excerpt from exchanges with the artist in December 2020.↩︎

4. In the preceding paragraphs we saw details concerning the evolution of the software industry, a movement governed by the interests of manufacturers and of the military sector, barely taking into account the opinion of academics and not at all that of artists.↩︎

5. These modes of thought, which are articulated with the destructuring practices we considered in chapter 2, will be mobilized again in the next chapter, for they will make it possible to accompany a new corpus of works that frontally attack the current – alienating – mode of existence of networked digital technology, that is, the Internet.↩︎

6. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima moralia: réflexions sur la vie mutilée. Paris : Payot, 2001, p. 207.↩︎

7. The manipulation of code is a central part of the dynamic of the creative processes that we will attempt to describe in more detail below.↩︎

8. Patrick Nardin, Effacer, défaire, dérégler, op. cit., p. 220.↩︎